Question

I saw the Rabbi’s enlightening remarks about a present majority, where the Rabbi explained, based on the distinction found in the later authorities (Acharonim), that an absent majority really speaks about a “general rule in nature,” whereas a present majority is based on reasoning. A sign of this is that with an absent majority one can conduct an experiment that would teach us the rule, whereas with a present majority there is no real way to test it—for example, with a piece of meat, there is no experiment one could design to check whether in most cases where there are 9 kosher shops the doubtful piece is in fact usually properly slaughtered, etc. And I saw that the Rabbi used this to answer the Sha'arei Yosher’s difficulty on the Sefer HaChinukh, since even according to the Sefer HaChinukh’s explanation—that in most cases the majority of judges are correct—there is no experiment one can do in reality, and therefore we determine it by reasoning, and that makes it a present majority.
However, this answers only the second difficulty there in Sha'arei Yosher on the Sefer HaChinukh, where he asked that according to the Sefer HaChinukh this should be an absent majority. But his first difficulty there, as I understand it, is that the mechanism in the case of the piece of meat and in the case of judges is simply not the same mechanism: with pieces of meat we say something like this: since most of the possible scenarios lead to the piece being kosher, it is probably kosher. But with judges there is no collection of “scenarios” that we are deciding between; rather, we simply claim that it is more reasonable that the majority of judges are correct.
I will try to explain the difficulty further (and even if this is not what Rabbi Shimon meant, I am raising it anyway): I cannot formulate a single formal rule that explains what a “present majority” is, in which cases this rule can be applied at all. Based on the case of the piece of meat, I would say that a present majority is something like: “In a case where I have a doubt about a certain object, and I have two known groups from which the object could have come, I assume it came from the majority group and not the minority group.” But in my view this formulation does not work for judges, since the object did not ‘come’ from the judges; it is not as though there are two groups of truths or two groups of laws and I say that the law came from group A rather than group B. Therefore, even though in both the case of the piece of meat and the case of judges I use reasoning in order to decide, I cannot formulate one formal rule that would unite the two cases and explain what counts as a case of “present majority,” in which cases one may use this rule.
Does the Rabbi have a solution to the difficulty? Can the Rabbi formulate, according to his explanation, such a formal rule that explains exactly in which cases one may apply a present majority, or explains why the formulation I suggested does indeed fit the case of judges?