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| Authored by: PJ on Saturday, May 12 2012 @ 11:46 AM EDT |
Working for a percentage gives the lawyer an
incentive to work hard for people with no
money to pay them otherwise.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 13 2012 @ 12:46 AM EDT |
The intellectual divide between lawyers and scientists goes
all the
way to very basic conceptions of truth and "proof".
And it's not just these
professions - most other fields fall
onto one side or the other of this fence.
It is all about
whether one looks at an issue as something to be
described
objectively, or something to be argued one way or the
other.
The most obvious example of these different attitudes
towards truth that I have met was something I heard in a radio debate. A court
case in the UK had found a woman innocent of murder on the basis of temporary
insanity caused by PMS (Apparently some women get it a lot worse than others -
men watch out!) Anyway the radio station had hooked up two experts, to discuss
the matter; a neurologist with research expertise in the effect of hormones on
brain function, and a university professor of womens studies.
What ensued
was almost hilarious and very illuminating. The two women talked completely past
each other in a case of total mutual incomprehension. The Neurologist was all
about neurotransmitters and chemistry and experiments into the functioning of
the brain. And the women's studies professor was talking how it COULDN'T be the
case that PMS could make a woman insane enough to commit murder BECAUSE this
could be used an an argument to disqualify women from positions of
responsibility.
I think that is when I first woke up to the fashion in
which politics is used in some arts subjects like an axiomatic system. You argue
that things are a certain way because POLITICALLY they HAVE to be that way. I
can't understand this way of thinking myself. I'm with the neurologist. I tend
to think there is a reality which is absolute and which does not bow to ephemera
like human politics. I find it hard to understand people who think the other
way. But I know they exist. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 13 2012 @ 03:34 AM EDT |
It seems to me that you're simply venting, which is OK. This is a very
frustrating kind of case to observe.
However, because of that I think that you have badly misrepresented what both
scientists and lawyers do. Also, you presume to generalize about how two very
broad classes of people think about something that's very ill-defined, even in
the sciences (that would be "truth").
Since you seem to include yourself in the class of scientists, you can probably
talk about how one scientist goes about his or her business, and anecdotally you
can probably talk about some others, perhaps even a large group of others.
Anecdotally speaking, my "scientist" friends (and myself) would
probably disagree with you very strongly about the nature of "truth"
and whether objectivity (being a disinterested third party) is even remotely
possible.
I suspect you don't know (m)any lawyers, and if you do know some you probably
don't know them very well. Even if you do, you're generalizing about a diverse
profession based on a very small group within that profession (litigators). If
you were a good scientist, by your own account, you would have attempted to
avoid bias (by talking to a large group of lawyers with different kinds of
practices, for starters).
That being said, you are also comparing two systems of behaviour that have very
different aims: one seeks to measure, understand, and find repeatability in the
phenomena of observations in the human mind. The other seeks to prevent or
resolve disputes (according to a very vague and constantly changing but usually
a bit behind the times system of ethics (or morality, if you prefer)) between
persons or classes of persons in order to help them live together without
harming each other too much.
Those are my observations, at any rate. I hope you find them useful, and I hope
you're feeling better now that you've gotten that off your chest. :)
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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