Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id JAA09013 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 20 Jan 2001 09:23:12 GMT Message-ID: <3A695604.DF0C5ADF@clara.co.uk> Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 09:10:30 +0000 From: Douglas Brooker <dbrooker@clara.co.uk> Organization: University of London X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: ....and the beat goes on and on and on... References: <LPBBICPHCJJBPJGHGMCIEENJCMAA.ddiamond@ozemail.com.au> <00f701c081fe$021cebe0$5eaefea9@cable.rcn.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Aaron Agassi wrote:
> Heck, Chris Lofting, do tell, will you acknowledge Ontology, objective
> reality, at all?
>
> If truth is possible, then the refinement, as you put it, may be productive.
>
> If there can be any such thing as truth, then the next question is whether
> there can be knowledge of any truth (correspondence to reality).
>
About 100 years ago the meanings of 'objective' and 'subjective' became
inverted. (Except in common law jurisprudence) What we now describe as
'objective' would before the change have been referred to as 'subjective'.
Considering that shifting meanings of words is a messy business, there had to
have been a theoretical point where both 'objective' and 'subjective' meant the
same thing! Sort of like when the North and South pole swap polarity - is it
every 25,000 years or so? This also makes me think of how the left-right
orientation of some written languages in the Levant became inverted about 3,000
(?) years ago. "|_" for example, became "_|".
Truth is also very problematic in legal theory. Some aspects of the 'truth'
problem in law elude legal scholars. The elusive aspects are those most embedded
in cultural values, and so taken for granted. Attitudes towards truth (and the
concept of the State) are a usually undiscussed subtext or much legal theory.
It is very difficult to see in oneself, until you experience a culture where
these values are absent or different. De Tocqueville wrote that there are some
truths about themselves that Americans can only learn from others (i.e. aliens -
used here in its U.S. legal sense). Legal scholars are trained in the law of a
specific jurisdiction, Germany, USA, etc, but come to legal theory as if there
was a very general something called 'Law' which their local
jurisdiction-specific training made them qualified to speak about. In one
sense, their training does, but behind this training are 100s of years of
accumulated cultural values. The relationship between legal expression and
these values is notoriously absent from the culture of law school. Lawyers
aren't trained in this kind of self awareness.
Culturally conditioned attitudes towards truth in jurisprudence are one of the
values neglected in legal education. European Civilian theorists speak of law
assuming truth is an absolute. European litigation is a search for this truth,
an inquisition led by the judge, and consequently the litigants have a less
important role to play in this inquest than in common law systems. Legal truth
in litigation in common law systems pursues a more relative truth, or 'parties'
truth' - litigants offer up to the court their versions of truth (and challenge
each others) and this in most cases is all that the court is permitted to work
with.
Both systems work very nicely (theoretically) at the local level. The problem
I study is what happens when the two competing truth orientations of common law
and civil law meet in legal theory, where scholars from both systems speak about
big L law without taking into account their different attitudes towards the
nature and role of truth in law. Whether its Civilians like Luhmann or Kelsen,
or Common law writers like Dworkin or Hart, both create a big L Law, as a
universal that essentially is just a more abstract version of their own local
system and far from universal. That's what I'm seeing alot of here.
When someone speaks about truth and correspondence to reality, it seems it's
time to put on the anthropologist's pith helmet and get out the note book and
start asking questions about everything except truth and its correspondence to
reality.
Douglas
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