Comparative Philosophy and Science in the Light of Comparative Law

Abstract

Every legal and ethical theory contains and requires for its validity epistemological and other non-normative assumptions. Since epistemological propositions are cognitively true or false, legal and ethical theory is cognitively true or false also. The world's legal systems fall into three major species: (1) Law of (biological) status, (2) Law of contract, and (3) Mediational disputesettling. Their corresponding epistemologies are (1E), naive radical empirical realism, (2E), concept-by-postulation universalism, and (3E), radical empiricism. Most people begin with law of status and its naive realistic epistemology. Their theories of natural science are also those of such an epistemology. If their scientific theory of heredity is that the female functions merely as a receptacle in which the male places all the inherited traits, the status codes are partriarchal; if, on the other hand, the female is thought of as contributing all the inherited traits, matriarchal law of status occurs. The distinguishing mark, however, of such a society is that all one's religious, legal, moral, political, and familial rights and duties are defined by the sensed tint of the skin of one's tribal ancestors, one's genealogical table, one's biological sex, and one's sensed temporal order of birth. Hence, status means biological rather than economic or division-of-labor status. In such societies, elaborate scientific theories exist. But, as even Professor Needham's recent studies clearly show, their concept of time is that of sensed cyclical time; their concept of mathematical number arises from the inductive counting of such temporal cycles, and all their scientific objects are defined in terms of sensed qualities, as is the case in the naive realistic physics and metaphysics of Aristotle. This shows most markedly in the role which nation in the sense of tribe plays in a law-of-status society. The castes of Aryan Hindu