Readoubt

ReaDoubt is an academic research project, which has been funded by the European Commission through a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship held by Marion Vorms, at Birkbeck College (University of London), from September 2015 to April 2018.

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The project studies the notion of reasonable doubt, both in its legal sense and as a central issue for reasoning and decision-making in general. In everyday life, as well as in the scientific, judicial, forensic, medical, financial, or policy-making contexts, agents face important decisions, which have to be made based on complex, incomplete, heterogeneous, and sometimes partially contradictory, information. Despite pervasive uncertainty and partial ignorance, practical necessity compels us to make our mind at some point. When is it reasonable to stop doubting and take action? Is there some threshold, beyond which it would be unreasonable to keep one's mind open to possible alternatives? And how could such threshold be set? When, on the other hand, is it reasonable to doubt, and seek more information? How do people, in practice, assess the reasonableness of doubt in different situations? More fundamentally, what kind of psychological states do 'doubt' and 'belief' refer to in different decisional contexts?

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This project tackles such issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, as it develops at the crossroads of epistemology and the psychology of reasoning. As such, it questions both what we should do, if we want to hold rational beliefs, and act rationally, and what people, as agents with limited cognitive abilities, actually do. Moreover, because science and the law are arguably two of the most well-known examples — prima facie thoroughly different from each other — of humans' efforts to design rules of rational method, ReaDoubt takes as its central domain of study judicial fact-finding and decision-making, and compares the model of judicial reasoning with the much more widely studied model of scientific reasoning, questioning their prima facie obvious differences.