An Analysis of Judicial Persuasion in Finding ‎Matters Subjected to Civil Lawsuits

The resolution of a judicially unknown matter requires acquiring knowledge about the external facts affecting the relevant case. The judge may go through a psychological, logical, and legal process for finding external facts to achieve conscientious persuasion. The judge also needs to know the basics and steps of forming a reliable belief before reaching a reliable belief. During the process of gaining a judicial belief, the judge does not need to psychologically and logically follow special regulations, but is only required to observe the general principles and rules of epistemology. This stage of proceedings is actually a matter of epistemology. This analytical-descriptive study aimed to analyze the rules of the epistemology of proof in civil proceedings, explores the ways to achieve a valid judicial belief and the factors affecting it from psychological and logical aspects, and proposes a criterion for measuring the validity and truth of judicial beliefs. The judge uses declarative sentences, which may be either true or false because of their nature, to express his/her knowledge of relevant matters as a form of judicial analogy. Such declarative sentences indicate the judge’s mental image of disputed issues obtained through a process of research and analysis for fact finding. According to Article 199 of the Civil Proceedings Law, the judge is obliged to try to discover the truth and form the knowledge and belief consistent with the outside world. The judge’s research scope and results are determined and announced based on the judge’s basic and acquired beliefs. Such beliefs are formed in the judge's mind and psyche under the influence of the concepts existing in his/her mind as well as his/her skill in mental imagery and application of logical arguments. However, intellectual background, prejudices, emotional factors, or intuitional knowledge can affect the formation of judicial beliefs in some cases. The judge's final belief consists of several partial beliefs, all of which should be justified and honest to cause the formation of a correct and realistic belief. Judicial beliefs must be well-founded and strongly correlated with the outside world. Since evidence is the connection ring of this correlation, a justified belief should be evidence-based. Judicial beliefs must be established based on logical thinking and reasoning because this process can reduce the risk of error or fraud in the induction of unreal matters. Truth refers to the conformity of a belief with the outside world's facts, and the judge can achieve a true belief only through pieces of evidence. Nevertheless, this is not possible in all lawsuits due to the difficulty of access to pieces of evidence and their uncertainty in achieving the pure truth about disputed facts. Therefore, judicial beliefs cannot be investigated from this viewpoint. Considering the importance of this issue, articles 3 and 4 of the Civil Proceedings Law, which emphasize the necessity of hostility settlement and encourage the use of heterogeneous tools in terms of fact-implying probability, expect appropriate and reasonable, not pure, conformity of judicial beliefs to the outside world. Although one of the important tasks of judges is to try to achieve judicial beliefs in pure conformity with facts, there is no definitive criterion to verify the truth of judicial beliefs because of the limited access to pieces of evidence and the varying degree to which they imply facts in the outside world. It can be hence stated that the coherence of beliefs constituting a judicial belief is a practical and reasonable criterion to measure the apparent truth of that judicial belief. The partial beliefs obtained in the fact finding process must create a special mental state for the judge to convince him/her that external facts exist. As a threshold for deciding about the verification of facts or “standard of proof”, this mental state is influenced by two factors: confidence and caution.