NORMS AND NOVELTY. Reflections on Legal Knowledge, Norms and Evolutionary Systems

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Tuzet
Author(s):  
Giovanni Tuzet

The paper has three sub-topics: legal knowledge, legal norms, and evolutionary systems. The three are interconnected. A reflection on the nature of legal knowledge throws light on the nature of legal norms. Legal knowledge is largely a posteriori and it is so because norms are largely contingent. Being a realm of continual change, law has novelty as a fundamental feature. The process of legal change is not driven by chance but by the attempt to face ever new problems and changing circumstances. This supports a view of legal systems as adaptive and evolutionary, as classical pragmatism suggested. However, inference can give some a priori legal knowledge.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin Cavanagh ◽  
Elizabeth Cauffman
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Alexander Kukharev ◽  
Alexander Rusu

This article discusses adaptation of the norms and ideals of Roman law to modern legal culture, the basis of Roman legal relations, which is the basis of modern law-making. It is important to learn how the culture of the law of ancient Rome influenced the formation of modern law of the digital age. The purpose of writing the paper was to highlight the influence of the legal culture of ancient Rome on modern reality.


Author(s):  
Timothy Williamson

This chapter develops and refines the analogy between knowledge and action in Knowledge and its Limits. The general schema is: knowledge is to belief as action is to intention. The analogy reverses direction of fit between mind and world. The knowledge/belief side corresponds to the inputs to practical reasoning, the action/intention side to its outputs. Since desires are inputs to practical reasoning, the desire-as-belief thesis is considered sympathetically. When all goes well with practical reasoning, one acts on what one knows. Belief plays the same local role as knowledge, and intention as action, in practical reasoning. This is the appropriate setting to understand knowledge norms for belief and practical reasoning. Marginalizing knowledge in epistemology is as perverse as marginalizing action in the philosophy of action. Opponents of knowledge-first epistemology are challenged to produce an equally systematic and plausible account of the relation between the cognitive and the practical.


Author(s):  
Mikkel Gerken

Chapter 6 concerns the normative relationship between action and knowledge ascriptions. Arguments are provided against a Knowledge Norm of Action (KNAC) and in favor of the Warrant-Action norm (WA). According to WA, S must be adequately warranted in believing that p relative to her deliberative context to meet the epistemic requirements for acting on p. WA is developed by specifying the deliberative context and by arguing that its explanatory power exceeds that of knowledge norms. A general conclusion is that the knowledge norm is an important example of a folk epistemological principle that does not pass muster as an epistemological principle. More generally, Chapter 6 introduces the debates about epistemic normativity and develops a specific epistemic norm of action.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa

This chapter defends a connection between knowledge and practical reasoning, according to which one’s reasons for action constitute all and only that which one knows. A variety of intuitive objections to such principles are considered and rejected—a central theme is that objectors to knowledge norms often make tacit but substantive ethical assumptions about which reasons, if held, would justify which actions. Absent broader ethical theorizing, the proposed counterexamples are inconclusive. The chapter sketches possible approaches to such theories, and indicates reason for optimism about knowledge norms. It also considers the degree to which knowledge norms imply externalism about rational action, suggesting that many internalist intuitions and verdicts may be accommodated and explained by knowledge norms.


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