Content area
Abstract
This dissertation aims to contribute to ‘historical epistemology,’ the examination of changing understandings of the nature of facts, evidence, objectivity and proof. It draws upon legal history, the history of evidence, the history of science and technology, and science studies. The dissertation focuses on the late nineteenth-century American courtroom, investigating the growing use of both scientific and visual evidence within legal trials, from roughly 1850 to 1910.
The dissertation consists of three parts. The first looks at the rise of photographic and other forms of visual evidence. The second looks at the growing importance of expert evidence. The third looks at the emergence of two specific forms of evidence: expert evidence in handwriting identification and disputed document examination, and the rapid acceptance of x-ray evidence. The dissertation also puts forward an argument for conceptualizing the courtroom as a ‘public epistemological space.’
Taken as a whole, the dissertation argues that there was a significant epistemic shift in the late nineteenth-century American courtroom. There came to be a growing suspicion of eyewitness testimony and an increasing though ambivalent faith in the higher persuasive value of evidence that seemed to make nature speak more directly. That evidence which seemed less mediated, less fallible, more direct, and more ‘objective’ came to be understood as belonging to a higher order of proof. Not only were visual and expert evidence more frequently deployed, but they also became more important evidentiary categories. The dissertation also argues that visual and expert evidence are more intimately linked than has been previously recognized, for experts often turned to visual evidence to augment their own claims to objectivity.
However, visual and expert evidence were also challenged in significant ways. This dissertation therefore resists telling a simple story of one epistemological mode eclipsing another. Rather, it details both the increasing belief in modes of proof more authoritative than the fallible, subjective lay witness, and, simultaneously, the practical inability for expert and visual evidence to serve this function. In this sense, it is explicitly genealogical, tracing the roots of the ambivalence about expert and demonstrative evidence that marks the contemporary courtroom as well. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
