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Scientific Consensus and Expert Testimony in Courts: Lessons from the Bendectin Litigation

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Abstract

A consensus in a scientific community is often used as a resource for making informed public-policy decisions and deciding between rival expert testimonies in legal trials. This paper contains a social-epistemic analysis of the high-profile Bendectin drug controversy, which was decided in the courtroom inter alia by deference to a scientific consensus about the safety of Bendectin. Drawing on my previously developed account of knowledge-based consensus, I argue that the consensus in this case was not knowledge based, hence courts’ deference to it was not epistemically justified. I draw sceptical lessons from this analysis regarding the value of scientific consensus as a desirable and reliable means of resolving scientific controversies in public life.

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Notes

  1. For accounts of expert testimony in different legal contexts see Golan (2004), Alder (2007), Cole (2001), Aronson (2007) and Lynch et al. (2009).

  2. This anti-luck condition is also meant to exclude so-called Gettier cases, which have been a major concern in epistemology in recent decades.

  3. One may wonder why only apparent consilience of evidence is required, rather than actual consilience. This is because actual consilience is too demanding a condition. The difficulty with determining whether the evidence is actually consilient, as opposed to seemingly consilient is threefold. First, de facto multiple methods for combining and weighing different lines of evidence are available and may generate different outcomes for the same body of evidence (Douglas 2012; Stegenga 2011). Second, even if there were only one widely agreed upon method for combining and weighing evidence, appealing to it for answering the question of when consensus is knowledge based merely because it enjoys a wide consensus would be question-begging, but all existing methods have their pros and cons. Third, all our current best methods for determining evidential support leave room for subjectivity (Douven 2009, 347–350; Douglas 2012).

  4. For a critical discussion of the Daubert decision and its flawed understanding of what it took to be the relevant issues in epistemology and philosophy of science see Haack (2003, 2004, 2005).

  5. See a table of the Bendectin cases and their outcomes in Edmond and Mercer (2000) at 304–305.

  6. This table relies on Sanders (1998, pp. 46–61). See there for full bibliographical references.

  7. See Parascandola (1997) and Simon (1992) for discussions of the relations between correlation and causation in tort law.

  8. For a discussion and critique of these claims see Cranor (2005).

  9. In a co-authored paper by Collins and Evans, they acknowledge that the use of science in court complicates things, and makes this advice problematic: “In courtrooms and the like, even the most routinized procedures with the longest historical entrenchment can be the subject of heated and detailed analysis” (Collins and Evans 2002, pp. 267–268).

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Acknowledgments

I thank Joseph Berkovitz, Jim Brown, Anjan Chakravartty, Arnon Keren, Laszlo Kosolosky, and Anat Leibler for comments on earlier versions of this paper. I thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal for helpful comments. This paper was partly written when I was an Azrieli Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa. I am grateful to the Azrieli Foundation for an award of an Azrieli Fellowship. I am also grateful to the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University, the Dan David Foundation, and the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, for postdoctoral fellowships.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, 6997801, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Boaz Miller

  2. The Graduate Program in STS, Bar Ilan University, 5290002, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Boaz Miller

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Miller, B. Scientific Consensus and Expert Testimony in Courts: Lessons from the Bendectin Litigation. Found Sci 21, 15–33 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-014-9373-z

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