Probable Cause

Concerning the difficulty of researching and writing historical ethnographies, the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, states:

[I]t ought to make us self-conscious about our vulnerability.  And the fact that we are not on very solid ground also ought to make us ethically and politically sensitive when we write about other cultures.  In historical ethnography, it should alert us to several acute methodological problems when we deal with archival and documentary material written before modern ethnography even got off the ground.  …  “Any ontology we use to ground the human sciences must ultimately be based on ‘faith’ since any ontology of even minimal significance must derive from a variety of sources, including the scholar’s religious and cultural heritage; and any ontology that we employ can never be final since the very historicity of our being prevents that.”  (Gananath Obeyesekere,The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (1997) 200.)

Well, what’s that got to do with criminal law?

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Albert Einstein once said:

A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.

Experiments help us find the answers to problems.  Experiments help us find the Truth, or the closest thing to it.  Without experiments, the world so many of us take for granted today would not exist.

But what does this mean?  What is an experiment?  And why am I, an attorney, writing about it on a legal blog?

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