Title: Fact and Evidence: From the Perspectives of Philosophy and Law
Lecturer: CHEN Bo (Professor, Department of Philosophy, Peking University)
Chairperson: ZHANG Liuhua (Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University)
Date: 9:30 am, November 3rd, 2017 (Friday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
The concept “fact” plays a key role in semantics, ontology, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of law, and juridical practice. At first, the speaker will challenge and criticize the metaphysical conception of fact that facts exist in the external world and are completely objective, expose a series of theoretical difficulties this conception of fact will face up. Then, he will develop the epistemic conception of fact as follows. Facts are torn down by us from the body of the world one slice after another; what is torn down partly depends on what we want to tear, i.e. our cognitive intention and goal; what we could tear down, i.e. our cognitive ability and capacity; how we tear, i.e. the way by which we extract facts from the world, and the actual situation or events of the world. Facts so understood are the mixture of objective elements from the actual world and subjective ones from cognitive agency. They are regarded to be “evidence” in scientific research and in judicial practice. Based on such kind of evidence, scientific research and judicial trial are liable to commit errors and mistakes, so they both establish a whole set of operational procedures and mechanisms for error prevention and error correction. Juridical trial should sincerely pursue “procedural justice” through which to ensure “substantial justice”. The guiding principle of juridical trial is at best changed from the old slogan “to take the fact as its basis, to take law as its criterion” to the new one “to take evidence as its basis, to take law as its criterion”.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
CHEN Bo, Ph.D, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Peking University, China. He was a visiting scholar at University of Helsinki, Finland, August 1997-August 1998, invited by Professor Georg Henrik von Wright; a CSCC Fellow at University of Miami, USA, February 2002-February 2003, awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Academy of Sciences, the Social Science Research Council, invited by Professor Susan Haack; an academic visitor at University of Oxford, UK, August 2007-August 2008, invited by Professor Timothy Williamson; a visiting scholar at Nihon University, Japan, invited by Professor Takashi Iida, the whole year of 2014. In last several years, he organized 7 international conferences separately on Frege, Quine, Kripke, Williamson, Paradoxes, Truth, and Philosophical Education & Contemporary Society at Peking University. His fields of competence and research cover logic and analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, history of logic, Frege, Quine, and Kripke. He also does comparative study of Chinese philosophy and Western philosophy. His most important Chinese academic books include Studies in Philosophy of Logic (2004, the revised and enlarged edition, 2013), Studies on Quine’s Philosophy--From Logical and Linguistic Points of View (1998), and Studies onParadoxes (2014). He has published almost 200 Chinese or English papers. His Academia webpage: https://pku.academia.edu/ChenBo.