Steve3007 wrote: ↑October 6th, 2020, 11:47 amIn what sense does preferring forensic evidence to eye witness testimony constitute elevating science over history?Ecurb wrote:One point I don't hear about much: lab reports are "histories". So to the extent that science has been elevated over history as a path to knowledge (for example forensic evidence is seen as more trustworthy than eye witness testimony in court) this may ignore the fact that written reports about experiments ARE histories.
As far as I can see, preferring forensic evidence to eye witness testimony simply amounts to preferring information about the past recorded outside brains to information about the past recorded inside brains. I presume that preference would be based on an assessment of the reliability, or otherwise, of brains as recording devices. I don't really see how that relates to relative elevations of science and history.
Human testimony is well-known to be unreliable. Not only is it extremely common for people to lie (i.e., to willfully state what they believe to be false), but it is also common for people to be mistaken (sometimes due to believing a liar, sometimes for some other reason). There has been a lot of research in psychology for why people get things wrong, and also about them lying. Anyone interested can do some online searching for this. The bottom line is, human testimony is not very good evidence in many instances.
This reminds me of a case some years ago; a man was convicted of rape, with the victim identifying him. He said he did not do it, but he was convicted and sent to prison. Years later, DNA evidence became a reality, and they tested the sample they had, and found out the man was innocent. The real rapist was already in prision for something else. The interesting thing is, the man who was falsely accused looked remarkably similar to the guy who actually did it. So the victim was not lying about what she saw, but she was mistaken because of the great similarity between the two men.