%0 Journal Article
%T Killing Kaplanism: Flawed methodologies, the standard of proof and modernity
%A William Cullerne Bown
%J The International Journal of Evidence & Proof
%@ 1740-5572
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1365712718798387
%X Attempts to establish a quantitative framework for policy-making in the criminal justice system in recent decades have coalesced around the problem of the standard of proof and Kaplan¡¯s influential 1968 paper. The central thread of work continues to use an equation he put forward while abandoning some of his foundational assumptions, an approach I call ¡®Kaplanism¡¯. Despite a growing awareness of deficiencies, elements of this school of thought, such as the parsing of concerns into the two categories of ¡®error reduction¡¯ and ¡®error distribution¡¯, have entered the general jurisprudential discourse. Here I launch a methodological attack and claim to kill this approach. This allows me to refute Laudan and other ¡®consequentialist¡¯ approaches to the standard identified by Walen, Walen¡¯s own approach and an important part of Stein¡¯s underpinnings. The same tools allow me to also refute Laudan¡¯s earlier m/n meta-epistemology, Lippke¡¯s ¡®adage¡¯, Stewart¡¯s formalisation of Dworkin, Dahlman¡¯s Bayesian work and (at least in criminal law) Kaplow¡¯s law and economics approach. I also refute Hamer¡¯s ¡®conventional rationale¡¯ for the current standard, Lillquist¡¯s approach to the same and what Epps reports as ¡®the Blackstone principle¡¯. The law is left with no epistemic basis for policies, which, I argue, leaves it struggling for public trust in the modern era
%K error distribution
%K feminism
%K meta-epistemology
%K modernity
%K sovereign
%K standard of proof
%K Blackstone¡¯s ratio
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1365712718798387