Monday, May 19, 2003

[Colin Glassey] When is a missing person dead? Found at The Volokh Conspiracy. This short legal opinion delves into that mystery of when is a person legally dead? The court ruled that when common law asserts a person is legally dead after being missing for seven years, that is ALL the law is doing. Common law does not say assert that the person was dead at the start of the 7 year time period, nor does it assert that the person was alive up until the 6 years and 354 days after they went missing. In effect, the person was in an indeterminate state, neither alive nor dead. 12:58:29 PM     [Colin Glassey] Economic Incentives for Juries This essay in Slate.com by Steven Landsburg is quite thought-provoking. He argues that juries should be given rewards for getting verdits right and punishments for getting verdicts wrong. I can't see anything wrong with his thinking but historically we have never seen anything like this in world civilization. That means this idea will never be tried, I think. Steven DenBeste has a lengthy essay on inductive vs. deductive reasoning and it all leads him to his arguement that no religious faith can be arrived at deductively. Den Beste is an atheist but it is a position that does not allow for certainty. This was a wonderfully entertaining essay and I learned something from it. Here is his take on the scientific method ...humans have, in the last three hundred years or so, developed a metasystem on top of personal induction which is designed to conserve the best conclusions induction offers us while having the best chance of rejecting and discarding its mistakes. It's a sort of collective and collaborative inductive process called "the scientific method". For instance, if there are alternative hypotheses about something, proponents of each may try to argue for why the data others relied on might be less reliable or persuasive than previously thought. Or perhaps someone may be able to propose a way of collecting and evaluating new evidence which would strongly support one theory over another. It's been highly successful, and if mathematics is the triumph of deduction, science is the triumph of induction. It consists of a body of theories which are not provably true (in the mathematical sense of "proof") but which in the best cases are so inductively certain as to be indistinguishable from fact. On the other hand, there are other theories within that overall body whose reliability is open to serious doubt, such as the current state of predictive climatology, or which are inductively at the "total horseshit" end of the scale, such as "creation science" or the ether theory of light or the phlogiston theory of combustion. Thanks Steven. 12:45:52 PM

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