Brute Facts Research Articles

The Perplexity of Judges Becomes the Scholar's Opportunity

Benjamin Cardozo, a great promoter of the concept of the unity of form and content in law and literature, once wrote that “[t]he perplexity of judges becomes the scholar's opportunity.” Cardozo's observation prompts my contribution on narratives in the law to this special issue on pluralities in the law because of the interrelation between law in academic theory and law in practice. My experience as a judge and an academic working in both the fields of law and literature, and law and humanities, allows me to provide a unique point of view. This Article argues the following: First, “to narrate is already to explain” as Paul Ricoeur wrote; the way in which the facts of a case are narrated largely determines the outcome of that case, therefore jurists need to develop and cherish narrative knowledge. Second, jurists should be imaginative about both the law and the people whose fates they determine when they use language to translate brute facts into the reality of the legal narrative. Third, this Article investigates and critically responds to literary theorists' various views on narrative and narratology, explaining which elements can be fruitfully incorporated into a legal narratology. I argue that jurists, while acting as authors and readers of legal narratives, all too often disregard what literary theory and the humanities more generally have to offer to legal practice, which is to highlight points of misunderstanding in our interdisciplinary literary-legal discussions. Here, too, scholarly opportunities remain to be seized for further clarification and theoretical elaboration of the bond of law and narrative.

On Jewish Being: Notes on Jean Améry

That the question of identity takes on a sense of urgency, one with its own possibilities and impossibilities, the moment that identity is bound up with death, is hardy surprising. What follows are a series of reflections on the question of identity, Jewish identity, raised by Jean Améry’s remarkable text On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew (Über Zwang und Unmöglichkeit, Jude zu sein). Améry’s text was of course published in the wake of his own experiences as an active member of the resistance, as having been imprisoned in Auschwitz and as the victim of torture. Philosophically, rather than biographically, if there were a point of comparison, then it is to Levinas’s 1947 text Etre juif. Both pose the problem of how the question of Jewish identity, Jewish being, is to be understood in the wake of the Shoah. The meaning of the formulations - Jude zu sein, Jude sein, Etre juif, Jewish being – delimits the question to be addressed. This will be the case even if its point of address, namely what the question stages, is itself far from straightforward. Moreover, while what is demanded within that question is itself philosophically important, it is equally the case that the question of Jewish being is at work within both communities and synagogues across the Jewish world. As a consequence it is as much a philosophical question as it is one that has a structuring effect on how Jewish survival is conceived (and thus equally on what that survival is taken to be). How survival is understood is an issue that continues to exert its force. Who is the subject of survival? What is the subject of survival? Who or what has been subjected to the issue of survival? Survival is both more nuanced and complex than the brute fact of an afterlife. Jewish being as a present question – a question of the present - continues therefore.

Jeri Caldwell at Moex, Inc.: CEO'S Dilemma

The COE at MOEX learns from the vice president of Strategic Human Resources exactly how people of color feel they are being treated under his leadership. Employee Jeri Caldwell has informed this vice president that she is considering filing discrimination charges against MOEX, based upon her not being promoted again. This case targets how systems and cultures can exclude people from participating and thriving in an organization. The material also bridges the experience of African American employees in U.S. corporations. This case is one in a series, where different employees reveal individual experiences with discrimination and how each functions within a large technology company. While this version of Jeri Caldwell focuses on the CEO as the decision maker, Jeri Caldwell at MOEX, Inc., (A) (UVA-OB-0691) and (B) (UVA-OB-0693) focus on the vice president in the primary decision-making role. Jeri Caldwell at MOEX, Inc.: CEO's Dilemma (Condensed) (UVA-OB-0834) is the abridged version of this case and shortens student preparation time. Excerpt UVA-OB-0836 JERI CALDWELL AT MOEX, INC.: CEO DILEMMA Shortly after Jeff Fairbanks had left his office, Mike Desmond, the CEO of Morris Electronics, Inc., (MOEX) stared out his window, reflecting on the situation at hand. Fairbanks, his vice president of Strategic Human Resources, had just told Desmond something curious and disturbing. Desmond had listened intently to Fairbanks and tried not to feel defensive as he heard some pretty harsh information about how some people in his company felt they were being treated. Fairbanks was the highest-ranking executive of color at MOEX. He had told Desmond he had received a call from an engineer, Jeri Caldwell, in which she relayed to him the details of what she called the Friday blowout. Frank Tanner, her manager for the past three months, had informed her that she was denied the promotion to product manager, and she had been unable to contain her frustration. Caldwell had been passed over twice before for similar promotions, and this time, after yelling at the top of her lungs, she had stormed out of Tanner's office. Caldwell asked Fairbanks to meet with her to discuss what she should do next—and he agreed to do so. Arriving at Caldwell's house the Sunday after the blowout, Fairbanks learned that three other African American MOEX employees were also invited. Normally, Fairbanks would not have met informally with an employee at the center of such a volatile situation, especially a situation that was happening at a management level three layers below him. But Fairbanks told Desmond that these were not normal circumstances, and that it was time for MOEX to face the brutal facts about diversity in the company. Desmond was disturbed over Fairbanks's information because he thought MOEX had made tremendous progress with its diversity initiative by recruiting from historically black colleges and universities, implementing the Diversity Advisory Council, and making other company efforts to be inclusive. Yet in the last 60 minutes, Fairbanks had revealed the kind of information Desmond had never heard before, and he was not sure what to do with what he had learned. . . .

Chai Jing's Under the Dome: A multimedia documentary in the digital age

ABSTRACTChai Jing's Under the Dome: Investigating China's Smog presents an unprecedented model of how a multi-media documentary can turn an environmental crisis into a dynamic media event that achieves mass virality. The “going viral” came about because of the interplay between unconventional multimedia documentary modes and an extensive digital network characterized by a large number of users resorting to various technologies. While the rhetorical persuasion built upon multimedia assets encouraged viewers to interact with or navigate through the story of an environmentally alarming reality, the digital media enabled citizens alerted to deadly environmental conditions to tap into a channel of green discussion and diverse voices. The irony of the film's initial virality provoking its short-lived circulation reveals once again the brute fact of media censorship and social-political constraints. In a polluted landscape and manipulated virtual space, open discussions and investigative exposures of environmental problems remain political and controversial.

Facing Fictions: The Insights and the Limits of Evolutionary Literary Psychology

In Evolving Hamlet: Seventeenth Century English Tragedy and the Ethics of Natural Selection, Angus Fletcher rightly argues against the idea, enthusiastically embraced by literary Darwinism, that evolution explains how exquisitely the individual mind and perhaps the progressive powers of the whole species are fitted to the world and therefore how exquisitely the world is fitted to the mind (in Wordsworth's famous phrase). Fletcher sees us as largely adapted (like all temporarily successful organisms) to the demands of reproductive success, but not adapted to the fact of adaptation. Literature — tragedy in particular — helps us cope, both individually and perhaps as a whole species, with the grim riddle of our estrangement from a world whose blind mechanisms we have to cope with. Some recent work in cognitive cultural studies can be taken to argue that aesthetic experiences arise out of these ways of coping: they give us incentives to cope, even as they express the fundamental psychological need felt by creatures who know their own mortality to cope with the fact that coping is ad hoc and fundamentally meaningless. We bargain wishfulness against knowledge and knowledge against wishfulness. Shared literary experience, most obviously of tragedy, allows us to make such bargains not only within ourselves but with the impresarios of the shared fiction and with other members of the audience we belong to as well (as for example when we adjudicate between Addison and Johnson on King Lear), and those bargains allow us to play off knowledge and wishfulness in ways that help us turn to interactions with others also in our condition to cope with the brute and blind fact of the natural world. Much work has been done in the distributed cognition required for complex social tasks like navigation or the production of plays. We will get to the heart of the evolutionary psychology of aesthetic experience if we see the distributed cognition that goes into the formation of an audience as well.

Beyond Dustbowl Empiricism

In this article, I argue that for risk/recidivism research to achieve its full potential, it must continue to grow beyond its empirical roots, a process that began more than 20 years ago. The theoretical model highlighted in the current article can explain one of the brute facts of criminology: namely, that past offending is one of the best predictors of future offending. By understanding how cognitive variables mediate the past crime–future crime relationship, we improve our ability to more effectively manage recidivism risk. Toward this end, six considerations for mediation analysis are discussed: variable selection, model creation, research design, data analysis, effect size estimation, and sensitivity testing. An illustrative example using attitude toward fighting as a mediator of the past physical aggression → future physical aggression relationship is presented.

Values, edusemiotics, and intercultural dialogue: From Russia with questions

AbstractEven after the “perestroika” and “glasnostj” in Russia, and increased communication in the interconnected world, the state of contemporary education there remains relatively unknown to Western scholars. This paper aims to ameliorate this problem by examining some of the signs comprising the system of education in Russia against the problematic of the historically American pursuit of happiness. While formal education in the West explicitly focuses on academic disciplines, in Russia there always existed an element of “bringing up” as a sign of the value-dimension infusing, sometimes implicitly, both formal and informal (or cultural) education. The paper intends to demonstrate the ubiquity and the importance of the edusemiotic conception of values-education irreducible to inculcation but oriented to self-formation embedded in human experience. An edusemiotic perspective problematizes the aims of education and emphasizes learning from experience, dialogue, coordination, meaning, and values. Values “reside” in lived experience, and edusemiotics surpasses education reduced to teaching of brute facts. The paper also critically examines education as socialization via social media and affirms spiritual education in contrast to persistent secularization.

Las concepciones aristotélicas de la vida buena y la falacia naturalista

<p class='p1'>Las concepciones de la vida buena de corte aristotélico frecuentemente son criticadas desde diversas posiciones éticas, como el antinaturalismo de G.E. Moore o los subjetivismos emotivistas y prescriptivistas, porque supuestamente cometen la falacia naturalista en su planteamiento acerca de cómo han de evaluarse moralmente las características, acciones, intenciones y facultades de los seres humanos. En este artículo, luego de examinar y desechar la estrategia de Alfonso Gómez-Lobo para rechazar esa acusación, propongo otra estrategia y sostengo que las concepciones aristotélicas inclusivistas de la vida buena pueden librarse de tal crítica apelando al concepto de “hechos brutos relativamente a. . . ” propuesta por G.E. Anscombe.</p>

On the Carroll–Chen Model

I argue that the Carroll–Chen cosmogonic model does not provide a plausible scientific explanation of the past hypothesis (the thesis that our universe began in an extremely low-entropy state). I suggest that this counts as a welcomed result for those who adopt a Mill–Ramsey–Lewis best systems account of laws and maintain that the past hypothesis is a brute fact that is a non-dynamical law.

Privacy: an institutional fact

Let us show how property is grasped as an institutional fact. If Jones steals a computer, he does not own it in the sense of property, but only exercises control towards it. If he buys the computer, he controls it too, and moreover owns it in the sense of property. In other words, simply exercising control towards something is a brute fact. This control counts asproperty only in a certain context: the computer counts as Jones's property only if he got it through a licit transfer. This is why property is not a brute fact, and is therefore an institutional fact. The same kind of reasoning applies to privacy. When a personal information P about Jones is openly diffused, it seems that P becomes public. From this point of view, a violation of privacy equates to a publication. The problem about this account is the following: who would call "publication of a book" the hacking of it on its author's computer? No one, because the word "publication" is an institutional word that only refers to a licit diffusion. Considering this answer, we may conclude as follows: if the diffusion of P is illicit, P still countsas private, even if everyone knows about it. If that conclusion is true, privacy is an institutional fact.

Ethnic profiling as negotiating: Traffic law enforcement in the Republic of Tatarstan (Russia)

Complex and ambiguous relations between state officials and civilians in Russia in general, and in Tatarstan in particular, are best reflected by daily communications between traffic police officers and motorists and pedestrians. These short interactions bring up issues of violence and minority discrimination, bribing, and dominant political values. In this paper based on my field research, I explore the practice of ethnic profiling employed by police officers and analyze its effects. I focus on identity construction and its “quality measurement.” Unlike a standardized system of weights or “brute facts,” law enforcement involves the creation of identities, including selective and sanctioned usage of, and manipulation by, ethnic traits. I conclude that ethnic profiling exists in Tatarstan, but stems not from nationalist inspirations of the controlling agents, but rather as an effect of rational economic decision-making. I also argue that despite its haphazard nature, ethnic minorities in Tatarstan are able to interact with controlling agencies more effectively than the majority, partially due to their alleged ability to employ collective action and partially because of the specific ethnic policy of the Republic.

Justice for Hedgehogs, Conceptual Authenticity for Foxes: Ronald Dworkin on Value Conflicts

In his 2011 book Justice for Hedgehogs, Ronald Dworkin makes a case for the view that genuine values cannot conflict and, moreover, that they are necessarily mutually supportive. I argue that by prioritizing coherence over the conceptual authenticity of values, Dworkin’s ‘interpretivist’ view risks neglecting what we care about in these values. I first determine Dworkin’s position on the monism/pluralism debate and identify the scope of his argument, arguing that despite his self-declared monism, he is in fact a pluralist, but unusual in denying conflict between plural values. I then set out the structure of his interpretive theory of value relations and present a case of value conflict which I think interpretivism cannot deal with. Following this I argue that there are structural reasons why cases like this are liable to occur and suggest that interpretivism will frequently fail to properly reflect people’s moral commitments because reinterpretation of values has the side effect of excluding important moral commitments from our conceptions of values. While, as Dworkin argues, there are no brute moral facts concerning values, moral psychology constrains the range of acceptable conceptions of values. Given the shortcomings of interpretivism I conclude that we should acknowledge that values may conflict.

From Enjoyment to Refusal: Marcuse, Psychoanalysis, and the Condition of Affluent Capitalism

From Enjoyment to RefusalMarcuse, Psychoanalysis, and the Condition of Affluent Capitalism Zachary Tavlin In this essay, I will attempt to provide a way to read a direct heir of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, with a key member of the Marxian Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse has clearly opened a relation between Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis in Eros and Civilization. I will draw upon Freud’s theories of society and culture, as well as his system of subject-formation. Then, after considering Marcuse’s corrective on the basis of historical capitalism, as well as his critique of consumer capitalism in One-Dimensional Man, I will apply Lacan’s theory of the “two deaths” as a way of pressing the theoretical relevance of Marcuse’s critique for affluent capitalism, which relies upon the “injunction to enjoy.” I will also draw upon Žižek’s reading of Lacan as a way of articulating the political obstacles of (what Žižek calls) postmodern ideology, and the requisite theoretical deadlocks that need to be overcome before one can say anything of practical import. Finally, I will discuss the relevance of the categories of private and public space for the situation of postmodern ideology, as a way to initiate a “proposal without a program” that draws upon the “ethic of refusal” at the heart of the death drive. marcuse and freud Marcuse’s move is not to overtly contend with Freud’s claim that civilization requires a repression of the drives, but to historicize it, so that we can view late capitalism from the perspective of its work on Eros and Thanatos (libido and death drive) and still develop a theoretical model of a non-repressive economic and cultural system. Freud posits that obedience to the pleasure principle becomes untenable in a reality-space where pleasures themselves (or those things that satisfy our desires, which for Freud must be material and not merely hallucinatory or phantasmatic) are scarce. For Freud, reality is constructed in the first place by the psyche once the hallucinatory object (primordially, of the mother’s breast), continually recalled, inevitably fails to satisfy the quantity of excitation released by the circulating drive. Here, one [End Page 64] interprets the pleasure principle alongside the reality principle; the ego responds to reality in order to regulate sustainable pleasures and close the gap between the sexual aim and object. Civilization and society are upper-level reality constructions for the individual, fully analogous to this primordial reality construction. The renunciation of an unrestrained (but ultimately inadequate, since it intends towards repeatable as well as unrepeatable objects) Eros is paid for by a modest though consistent Eros, weakened and made indirect through the extension of desire toward social mediations like friendship (specifically friendships of utility, which in the influential Aristotelian account are degraded forms of friendship). For Freud, the result is being-with (a term I borrow from Heidegger to mark a difference: for the latter, Mit-sein is not produced but is rather an originary condition for Dasein). But it is, to a certain extent, the source of suffering: We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents 26, italics mine) The suffering of civilized society is born out of the social contract’s (implicit) stipulation that absolute gratification is to be denied to its members. This is a problem for Freud, but a structurally necessary one. And importantly, as a principle of civilization, the price (of repression and neurotic symptoms) is universal and not dependent upon the means and style of production. But what if this structural scarcity is not universal with regard to civilization as such, but indeed particular to the logic of capital? Certainly, as Marcuse points out, concentration of wealth in the hands of a few provides a specific type of scarcity. Marcuse goes further and affirms the question: “[Freud’s argument] applies to the brute fact of scarcity what actually...

Effective Team Work in Social Work

others.The successful person should know that the first lesson is that his opinion represents only one side of the fact. If, for instance, you would like to see the elephant, you should come closer to it and examine it from all points of view. When you might be able to communicate and sympathize with those who examine it from the other side. You might think of moving the elephant to another more suitable place but you won’t be able to move the elephant on your own even if you planned it very well. What you need is a team work to carry the elephant from all sides.The team should know the objective and how the elephant will seen the public in its new location. Rachel Mckee and Bruce Carlson(2002) said that people are the most important resource available to any organization. Yet most organizations struggle with how to gain the best from that resource. How do you create a working environment that stimulates creativity and innovation without losing control of the process? How do you foster commitment and personal stake so that everyone performs with enthusiasm? How do you introduce dramatic change so that people embrace challenges with enthusiasm, vigor, and belief? The answer to all of these questions is by creating a culture of sound teamwork. The team is the single most powerful unit of change in an organization from the executive team down. Teams that thrive are characterized by several strengths that can be summarized in key phrases like strong leadership, shared vision and goals, positive attitudes toward change, resilience in the face of conflict, sound problem-solving skills, and an ability to confront the brutal facts of reality. The list goes on and on, but what it all boils down to is that they have strong relationships based on mutual trust and respect. When considering how to build strong teams, most organizations focus on technical skills and capital resources and often overlook the most important feature of sound teamwork: relationships. We think we can simply throw people together, tell them what to do, and off they will go in pursuit of creativity, innovation, and commitment. Relationships are the connecting link between individuals on a team. When they are based on trust and respect, a healthy flow of ideas, energy, and support travels back and forth creating breakthroughs and value added on a regular basis. When trust and respect are absent or in question, very little of value is ever exchanged beyond basic information, and common undertakings lead to only average outcomes at best. In fact, it is the quality of the relationship in a team or in an organization as a whole that is the single biggest determinant of results

Interpreting Spinoza: The Real is the Rational

Interpreting Spinoza:The Real is the Rational Michael Della Rocca (bio) in his characteristically generous and searching discussion of my book, Spinoza, Daniel Garber rightly points out that I structure my interpretation of Spinoza’s system around the principle of sufficient reason (the PSR). This is the principle that, as I and others sometimes put it, each fact has an explanation and is thus not brute, or the principle that each thing has an explanation. The ‘or’ will soon be important. Indeed, it might seem that I am too focused on the PSR—certainly I seem that way to Garber1—for I seek to use the PSR to unlock any number of problems that interpreters of Spinoza have faced over the last three centuries. Garber does a great job of conveying the range of uses to which I put the PSR in an attempt to bring Spinoza’s system under control, so I will not go into the details except to say that the interpretation I offer covers not only Spinoza’s metaphysics, but also his epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychology, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and, in a way, his account of human salvation. I also will not talk about the crucial two-fold use to which Spinoza puts the PSR and which leads to some of the idealist strands of my reading. Garber omits any discussion of the two-fold use, and so I will leave it out here too. The general point is that, for me, the PSR opens up breathtaking interpretive vistas that reveal Spinoza’s system to be coherent, defensible, and groundbreaking in unexpected ways. It is an exciting story, one that I was and am happy to tell. Garber’s aim in his essay is to challenge my reading of Spinoza both on first-order interpretive grounds and on second-order methodological grounds. With regard to the first-order worries, Garber’s main points are that there is no good evidence that Spinoza is committed to the PSR in the strong—“no brute facts”—form in which I present it and that Spinoza does in fact allow at least one major brute fact at the heart of his system. With regard to the second-order worries, Garber expresses a preference for what he sees as a “direct reading” of Spinoza over what he sees as my rational reconstructions of Spinoza. His Spinoza is the [End Page 523] “real historical” Spinoza, whereas mine is an ideal type, a superhero but not the actual philosopher. I would like to push back a bit against Garber on both the first- and second-order grounds. With regard to the first-order worries, I reaffirm my textually well-grounded reasons for seeing Spinoza as espousing a strong form of the PSR, and I also offer reasons for denying that there is the big brute fact that Garber finds in Spinoza’s system. With regard to Garber’s second-order, methodological worries, my main aim will be to try to characterize more accurately some genuine methodological differences between us and to stress that both Garber’s approach and my own are valuable ways of getting at the real Spinoza. Before turning to the first-order skirmishes and second-order methodological love fest, I would like to offer two observations about the way in which Garber frames his discussion of my book and of my approach to Spinoza. First, at the outset, Garber compares the single-mindedness of my PSR-focused perspective on Spinoza both to the single-mindedness of Russell’s interpretation of Leibniz’s philosophy as motivated by his logic2 and to the single-mindedness of Bernard Williams’s interpretation of the Descartes of the Meditations as a “pure enquirer.”3 I am, of course, only too happy for my work on Spinoza to be mentioned in the same paragraph (or book or library!) as these classic works by Russell and Williams; and, however inapt the comparison would be in other respects, I regard Garber as correct in pointing out similarities between the apparently unified interpretations at work in my book and in these others. I would also say that many other works on historical...

‘Economic property rights’ as ‘nonsense upon stilts’: a comment on Hodgson

AbstractHodgson's (2015) critique of extra-legal ‘property rights’ – in this case, so-called ‘economic property rights’ – is right on target. This Comment contributes two further points to his critique. First, the notion of ‘economic property rights’ is based on what Gilbert Ryle (1949) referred to as a ‘category mistake’, conflating physical possession, which is a brute fact about the world, with the right or entitlement to possession, which is a social or institutional fact that cannot exist in the absence of some social contract, convention, covenant, or agreement. The very notion of a non-institutional ‘right’ is oxymoronic. Second, the fact that property is an institutional fact does not mean it must exist with the structure of a ‘state’ (as Bentham suggested). Rather, institutions like ‘property rights’ only require some community, however large or small, operating with what Searle (1995; 2005) calls collective intentionality and collective acceptance, according to shared ‘rules of recognition’ (Hart, 1997).

The Problem of Holiness

Holiness is an important but problematic concept for religious discourse. It is unclear what it means, both in classical texts and in contemporary usage. Holiness seems to signify a property in some cases and a relation in others. The Bible itself preserves a range of usages. Some of these are ontological: holiness as a would-be property inheres in objects, places, persons, or times. Other uses are imputed: holiness connotes a status that human beings ascribe to things. The range of use can be explicated by the concept of a social or institutional reality developed by Searle. Social facts entail valuations, intentions, and practices; they presuppose a basis of brute fact. A plausible contemporary view of holiness will link ontological and axiological commitments in such a way as to express the underlying goodness of being.

Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America

Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America

Do Brute Facts Need to Be Civilised? Universals in Classical Indian Philosophy and Contemporary Analytic Ontology

A vital point of dispute within both classical Indian thought and contemporary analytic ontology is the following: which facts are brute so that they are, so to speak, beyond any need of civilizing through logical transformations, conceptual revisions, or linguistic reformulations? In this article, we discuss certain strands of the debate in these fields with two central purposes in mind. Firstly, we shall argue that metaphysical debates are seemingly interminable partly because disputing parties carve up the ontological landscape in such a manner that what one party views as primitive, basic, or fundamental is regarded by an opponent as derivative, imagined, or constructed and vice versa. Second, unlike debates over these themes in contemporary analytic ontology, the classical Indian counterparts were usually located within a soteriological context, where it was claimed that an individual should develop meditative praxis on the way towards the goal of ultimate liberation. While it might seem that one could appeal to “experience” in this manner to settle the debate over whether universals were fundamental ingredients of the fabric of reality or merely conceptual artefacts, we shall argue that this approach is complicated by the fact that aspirants in these traditions would interpret their experiences in accordance with their doctrinal schemes. Therefore, the question of whether or not this appeal succeeds leads us to an ongoing dispute in religious epistemology over whether experiences are completely “constructed” by doctrinal context.

Reciprocal Illumination: Epistemological Necessity or Ontological Destiny? Some Preliminary Remarks

This paper explores two different but intimately linked concepts. First, there is “reciprocal illumination”, or the relation of interdependence of the object of knowledge and its subject. Second is the “irreversibility” which characterizes the process of applying constitutive rules, which causes institutional facts to become facts, and to be even stricter and more epistemologically constant than brute facts.