Signs Without Authority: The Battle of Experts, the Caricature of a Discourse and the Failure of Scientific Evidence

Abstract

Science and law have a vast influence upon the inhabitants of any state. The empirical assertions of the scientist can serve as a foundation for effective law, the two working in concert to occupy a space once filled solely by fickle nature gods and arbitrary tyrants. The shared belief structure of society rests heavily upon these two systems of meaning-making. In each discipline, and under the coordination of scientific and legal efforts, clear and effective policy has emerged thanks to the intense linguistic and authoritative discipline each field maintains. That this should be the case does not surprise. For the scientist and the lawyer, the necessities and problems of their work have produced formal textual solutions that belie the complexities of the linguistic issues present underneath. As a result, the conduct of the attorney and the scientist embody an attitude of blind instrumentalism with regard to the textual product of their discipline, and with regard to the integration of other material into their discipline. Blind because neither practice is fully aware of its semiotic activity, and instrumentalist because to each has been made plain the stakes if the discipline of their code is not maintained. Emerging theories in genetics, neurology, forensics and other disciplines have the potential to create major changes to the legal construction of agency, identity, and authority. These specific subjects retain their own controversies in both legal and scientific practice, which may in time produce changes with their own semiotic payload. This text addresses broadly the transformation of scientific conjecture into legal reality, and the destruction of meaning that this has come to entail.

Source: MARRIOTT, ROBERT: “Signs without authority: The battle of experts, the caricature of a discourse and the failure of scientific evidence” Prize winning paper of the Roberta Kevelson Seminar on Law & Semiotics, 2012 The philosophy and theory underlying scientific representation is invoked in court cases later considered in this chapter. However, this coverage is itself not semiotic in nature and is, as I hope to demonstrate, self-contradicting. Although meaning-making occurs in scientific fields, it does not survive the transition to law, and as such plays little role in this analysis beyond that of the victim