Whit Andrews

I gotta admit I had to read this remarkable blog entry on philosophy and e-discovery multiple times and I will probably do it again. The entry at times reads like the most self-conscious columns I wrote in college for the college newspaper, including dismal ruminations on afternoon sunlight and…OK, don’t go look them up, please? However, it’s also got sections like this:

Specifically, as Law updates to keep pace with emergent technology, I believe that supplying a linguistic framework to help make sense of its language artifacts is crucial. Terms like ‘knowledge’, ‘belief’ and ‘reasonable’ are not benign. Nor are they clear. Historically, outside of law, these terms have received extensive attention and analysis, chiefly within the area of philosophy called epistemology: essentially, the study of the nature, scope and limitations of knowledge. There, ‘knowledge’ has been understood according to types and conditions – not any single-sentence definition.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is righteous thinking. Every profession appropriates the generalist vocabulary of its languages (and typically mainly its primary language) to create a subvocabulary which it then defends ferociously like the purist community it is. This post artfully if sometimes floriferously (look that up in your Flog and Wagnall’s) points to the challenges that we all face. Gartner is always careful about pointing out that we don’t give legal advice, and I am sure that sometimes, at least, lawyers wish they could do the same. One reason for that is that we ourselves are regularly at work in the linguistic mines, carving out our own terminologies. Try the notion of “search” in law and “search” in IT, for example.

E-discovery is veined with deceptive veins of intellectual assumption. When a “reasonable man” uses Google to find a pizza joint near the courthouse, what will “reasonable” then mean in the rules of civil procedure in states, at the magistrates’ courts, in The Hague and in the break room? We’re still sorting it out, same as Socrates.