Publication details
Faultless Disagreement and Jurisprudence
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Legal thinking seems to allow for the so-called faultless disagreement. For example, two lawyers can disagree on the interpretation of the law without either of them being at fault. But according to classical logic, the occurrence of genuine disagreement necessarily entails the existence of some mistake. Perhaps this problem can be solved by an appropriate choice of non-classical logic. There are a number of proposals, including intuitionistic logic, paraconsistent logic, three-valued logic, truth-relativism, analetheism and falsificationism. The problem of faultless disagreement is even more interesting when applied to jurisprudence itself. We can consider the following thought experiment. Imagine we cognitively idealize some legal positivist and some natural law theorist. Now both are perfectly informed and make no epistemic mistakes. Should we expect their theoretical disagreement to survive this idealization? Or should we expect their views to converge toward agreement? If the second answer applies, should we expect agreement on a particular theory or just agnostic "agreement"? Of course, we don't know what would happen in idealized conditions. We only have some expectations. However, these expectations affect our approach to theoretical disagreements under non-ideal conditions. |
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