Yes.
I never once said it was "bullshit", Yazata. "more often than not, wholly unreliable" does not amount to "bullshit by its nature".
You seem to be insisting that in the majority of cases ("more often than not") eye-witness testimony is not informative at all ("wholly unreliable").
You should perhaps learn to take note of what you read.. Pay particular attention to the word "often", for example. Come on, Yazata, you can do it!
I've been quoting you word for word: "more often than not, wholly unreliable". Your words. Where did "often" appear?
What I said, is not represented or even close to what you said. I never said it was bullshit. I literally said that it has a high tendency to be unreliable.
In a
majority of cases?
Entirely unreliable?
I also provided countless of studies and recommendations from other studies and papers, which set out guidelines, many of which were also recommended by the DoJ and which have only been applied in a dozen or so States, to try to reduce the tainting of eyewitnesses. I had also provided this in the past, in discussions with MR.
You and Kittamaru haven't provided anything that backs up your claim that the majority of eye-witness courtroom testimony is wholly unreliable. I don't believe that any competent legal scholar would write such a thing.
The claim that eyewitness testimony
can sometimes be unreliable is a very different and far less contentious claim. The idea that witnesses shouldn't be coached, led or "tainted" isn't controversial either (it has a long history in common law), and certainly doesn't imply that the majority of people reporting their personal experiences in court, in everyday life and in scientific laboratories are wholly unreliable.
And you took that, even referred to it in your posts in this thread and turned it into my saying that it was "bullshit". You are like the person who sees something, then festers about it and in doing so, re-invents it and taints it with your own bias, and then believes that you are a capable witness.
I'm not festering about anything. I have professional paralegal experience interviewing witnesses and I have some graduate level training in philosophy that qualifies me to be a community college critical-thinking instructor. My interest in this thread arises from that perspective.
I don't like seeing bad philosophical principles enshrined as Sciforums orthodoxy just because they are useful in attacking MR's paranormal credulity. It's simply not true that any argument becomes a good argument if its employed in what is perceived as a good cause. There's way too much of that kind of foolishness on this board already, and it's one reason why the board seems so militantly stupid sometimes.
In my last post I wrote:
If eyewitness testimony is in most instances, entirely unreliable, then eyewitness testimony would seem to generally speaking be bullshit by its nature.
I think that attack on the epistemic value of personal experience is hugely overstated. If it was true it would contradict not only the evidence of everyday life, but also totally subvert scientific empiricism rendering science impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
If your point is merely that eyewitness testimony needn't always be accepted with total credulity and isn't always 100% true, then you need to walk your remarks back by qualifying them. (I fully agree with that more reasonable qualified version and have argued for it repeatedly in many threads.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallibilism
Wow, the level of trolling here is extreme.
Why? I do think that the idea that eye-witness testimony is "more often than not, wholly unreliable" does create serious problems for empiricism, for the idea that "knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience". "Empirical evidence is information that justifies the truth or falsity of a claim. In the empiricist view, one can claim to have knowledge only when based on empirical evidence." (both quotes from wikipedia.) By implication, dismissing the empirical basis of knowledge of matters of fact creates serious problems for empirical science which is based on observation and experiment.
And rather than backing you into a corner, I gave you a nice easy out. I even pointed out how to do it, simply by qualifying the initial idea that reports from personal experience are "more often than not, wholly unreliable" to the far more defensible claim that reports from personal experience "may in some cases be unreliable".
