Epistemology On Criminal Trial

Criminal trial activities are essentially a special cognitive activity.In order to obtain factfinding and law application that conform to subjective and objective standards,under the regulation of the established judicial system and criminal procedure rules,judges comprehensively use logical and empirical methods to actively carry out trial understanding.The contradictions and problems among them should not be treated in isolation.Under the guidance of philosophical epistemology,they should be analyzed by looking at cognitive rules of criminal trials in order to discover solutions to the problems.In order to systematically and deeply investigate the cognitive process by judges,this dissertation argues that it is necessary to build a specific cognitive system for criminal trials,maintaining homogeneity with judges by virtue of the three laws(i.e.,the law of identity,the law of contradiction,and the law of excluded middle),so that the cognitive system can reflect the will of judges in all stages of criminal trials.This system should also follow the law of ontology and the law of process theory to ensure that it can accurately capture the features of the object and reflect its essence truthfully with a variety of corresponding dialectical methods.Meanwhile,based on the criteria of sufficiency,coherence and economy,the cognitive system should operate coordinately to reach a correct conclusion of adjudication ultimately.To answer the questions of who and what in criminal trials,this dissertation uses epistemology to analyze and explain the attributes of judges(as the subject)and cases(as the object),as well as their relationship with the cognitive system in trials.The subjectivity of judges controls and dominates the cognitive system in two internal aspects,i.e.,motivation and direction.In terms of motivation,the subjectivity of judges demonstrates the conflict and unity of passivity and initiative in that judges not only passively accept information from cases and adjudicate neutrally but also actively process information,advance the trial process,and make conclusions.Regarding direction,the subjectivity of judges exhibits the division and balance of ethics and motivation.Judges have to ensure that the cognitive system is in line with the goal of virtue and responsibility and simultaneously they carry their own hidden motivation.External factors such as ideology,historical tradition and social morality must be internalized into the judges' subjective paradigm of thinking and become the external features of the judges' subjectivity.The structural features of objects in a criminal trial determine that the cognitive system needs to adopt a dialectical paradigm of thinking that is consistent with it.The discontinuity and continuity of the gradual advancement of evidence,facts and legal rules in the object decide that the cognitive system should apply methods,such as abstraction and generalization,deduction and induction,analysis and synthesis,to them respectively.The dynamic feature of the unifying/opposing opinions from the prosecution and the defense requires that the cognitive system should be treated with the method of negation of negation.In order to describe the operation of the trial cognitive system and answer the question of how to recognize the cognitive system in criminal trial,the dissertation divides the process of trial cognition into two stages: from evidence to facts,and from facts to legal evaluation.The fact-finding stage has the attribute of "empirical" thinking.The specific mode of trial cognition is called "iterative mode".That is,judges integrate each point of view from the prosecution and the defense into his own cognition,cyclically correct itself,and then draw a periodical cognitive conclusion.This mode reveals a cognitive style of gradually deepening thinking with the dialogue between the prosecution and the defense.The screening of qualification of pretrial evidence and the separation of complex and simple proving modes are sufficient preparations for the "iterative mode".Court interrogation and cross-examination of evidence are an important part of the "iterative mode".A necessary supplement is the implementation of judges' rights of investigation out of court.The evidence chain formed is the substantive achievement of the“iterative mode”.The stage of law application has the attribute of “argumentation” thinking,which is reflected in the construction of logical implication,the balance between prosecution and defense,and the interpretation of the conclusions obtained.Its core lies in weighing arguments.That is,it uses the divergent thinking of universal connections to extensively seek evidence,and makes value choices after weighing the positive and negative arguments by using the “six-direction” method(vertical,horizontal,forward,reverse,medial and lateral).With an aim to reveal the problems and causes of trial cognition in judicial practice,this dissertation adopts data analysis,case induction,questionnaires and subjective interviews for investigation.Through the analysis on cases of amending an adjudication to acquittal after retrial in the past three years,this dissertation divides the misunderstanding of fact construction into two types of evidence-based problems and three types of fact-reasoning problems.The two evidence-based problems are lack of authenticity from evidence and lack of sufficient evidence and the three fact-reasoning problems are untenable logical reasoning of the “preceding item”,the overturn of the “latter item” and the unstable connection.It is believed that the abovementioned errors are mainly caused by the lack of effective proof methods,weak falsification and the insufficient realization of “trial substantiation”.Through the analysis of guiding criminal cases,four types of misunderstandings in the application of the law are summarized: the expanded major and minor premises in the "judicial syllogism",the narrowed major premise with the expansion of the minor premise,the narrowed major premise alone,and the error in selecting the major or the minor premise.As a result,this dissertation points out three weaknesses of the current legal argumentation method,i.e.,the easily fractured logical structure,the poor saturation of nested arguments from each level and the quotation of the minor premise out of context.Additionally,in the operation of assisting mechanism of consultation in trials,the formalization of the jury system,as well as the incomplete regulation of professional judges' meetings and the reporting system limit its due role,and may even lead to improper manipulation of trial cognition.The key to solving the abovementioned problems is to build a set of reasonable and effective systems to provide specific operational guidelines for trial cognition.Among them,the focus of solving the problem of fact-finding is to promote the "substantiation of proof".It requires an exploration of scientific methods of proof as the main line,and a set of supporting regulations that meet the standard of evidence,implement in the trial procedure and help the reasoning of judicial documents.Based on the practice of trial work,this dissertation proposes the four-in-one method of proof,including “bridge construction method”,“muscle and bone theory”,“conversation mode” and “refutation theory”,and puts forward 11 specific rules accordingly.In order to solve the problem of law application,this dissertation introduces rules of internal and external justification and divides legal argumentation into "internal justification" with logical syllogism as the overall framework and "external justification" with the law interpretation method,the balance of empirical values and the post-judgment social effects as the important basis.With 10 specific suggestions,this dissertation attempts to construct the argumentation process with “logical coherence and unifying value” in order to eliminate divergence in the application of the law and to further ensure the accuracy and appropriateness of arbitration.To meet the requirement of judicial intelligence,this dissertation also proposes to use neural network algorithm to assist judicial cognition and to integrate the correct concepts and methods of judicial cognition into artificial intelligence.This would make artificial intelligence conform to the pattern of judicial cognition and become the perfect combination of science,rules,logic and experience.