Thursday, September 9, 2010
Plausible Claims
In Chapter 3, Epstein briefly talks about plausible claims, but it is not hard to learn what the purpose of a plausible claim actually is. When writing a plausible claim, it can be a recognized as a response to some type of literature, and they are seen very often in a court room. According to Epstein, "A claim is plausible if we have good reason to believe it is true" (38). If someone is not completely sold on a claim that, for example, you are trying to make, your claim is less plausible because that person does not have a very good reason to believe your claim is absolutely true. If there is no reason to believe a claim is true, that claim is considered skeptical and implausible. Even the Supreme Court now requires that a plaintiff must state a plausible claim for relief, which I noticed last semester when I had to sit through a case for a class project. The plaintiff said "I am suing Bob for stabbing my daughter with a knife because she has a hole in her chest." This claim was considered plausible because they had pictures of the girls' wound in the court room, and the girl said that the man who she recognized was the one that stabbed her.
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I had not read about plausible claims yet in the book, but your example has already made it fairly clear to me what they are. I recognize these types of claims from TV shows with court rooms. I noticed that they refer to these claims either being present or not being present, depending on the case they are arguing. For instance, if a lawyer was trying to defend someone accused of murder they would want to instill a sense of reasonable doubt in the jury that would not otherwise exist had one of these statements been made. In the example you gave, it is undoubtedly clear that Bob stabbed the girl in question because they have proof. Statements like these are crucial in a court room, as I am sure you have seen first-hand from your class project.
ReplyDeleteI like how you brought an example from a court situation to explain plausible claims. It is good to see how things we learn in class are directly used in real life. It also made it very easy to understand. It showed how direct and self-explanatory a claim has to be for people to believe it and to dub it “plausible”. It makes me wonder if sometimes a claim can be plausible for one person and not for another, just based off of the amount of background information they have on that certain topic. But that might be making things too complicated.
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