ABSTRACT
Social scientific discussions of the acceptability of rules and procedures in the law of evidence (and elsewhere) must be certain that they have first grasped the point of what they are criticizing. What if they ‘transform’ the object of their enquiries in the course of interpreting them?
This paper examines the possibilities for finding the ‘meta-theory’ which will best allow this issue to be debated and resolved. It considers ‘reconstructive’ and ‘deconstructive’ approaches to the building of such a theory and concludes by recommending a ‘dialogic’ strategy in which legal and (social) scientific styles of argumentation enter into mutual interrogation.
‘The normative question of how expert knowledge is best assessed, and how experts themselves are best evaluated and kept under a modicum of control, raises such intractable and viciously circular problems as to strangle speech’. 1
