An Epistemologist in the Bramble-Bush: At the Supreme Court with Mr. Joiner

“Judges Become Leery of Expert Witnesses,” ran a headline in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago; they are “Skeptical of Unproven Science”—the “Testimony of Dilettantes” (Schmitt 1997). Intrigued, I began to struggle through thickets of details of exploding tires, allegedly poisonous perfumes, leaking and bursting breast implants, contaminated insulating oil, etc., etc., and through legal developments from Frye through the Federal Rules of Evidence to Daubert, until eventually I found myself at the U.S. Supreme Court with Mr. Joiner, eavesdropping as the justices —for all the world like a conclave of medieval logicians—disagreed among themselves about whether there is a Categorical Distinction between methodology and conclusions. Now that, I thought, certainly sounds like the kind of question to which