Truth and legal argumentation in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Karamazov Brothers

Abstract

We examine the reasons of the judicial error in the Dmitry Karamazov case depicted by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Karamazov Brothers and argue that the truth can and should be established in both of the process types, adversary and investigative, and that the three conceptions of truth, referential, inferential and pragmatic, play an evaluative role in that. The Dmitry Karamazov case shows that the formal view of the truth suffices for deciding a case, but it cannot prevent judicial errors when the epistemological ideal of the material truth falls into oblivion.

Trends in Argumentation Logic

“…This is very applicable now, e.g., in medicine [2]. Another very significant area of studying argumentation is presented by legal norms and an applicability of logic and argumentation to them [3], [7], [8], [9], [11].…”