About The Workshop
SW 57- Inferentialism in the Legal Domain
Convenors: Thomas Bustamante; Joshua Nichols
Contact: thomas_bustamante@yahoo.com.br; joshua.nichols@mcgill.ca
Robert Brandom’s inferentialism has developed an explanatorily powerful account of conceptual determinateness that is especially well-positioned to address the problem of indeterminacy and provide a normative model for methodological objectivity in the legal domain. In works like Making It Explicit and A Spirit of Trust, he laid the foundation of a nonpsychological account of conceptual contents and a methodological pragmatism that rejects both the empiricist conceptions of truth and knowledge and traditional forms of semantics (that endorse an order of explanation in which the content of concepts is completely determined in advance of their application of to a given case). One of the results of Brandom’s recent works is a Hegelian Model in which pragmatics comes before semantics, and the rules that determine the content of legal concepts are instituted through the practice of their critical applications in the contexts of deliberation about one’s conduct and assessment of the deeds of other participants in normative practices. In that Hegelian Model, the process of institution of conceptual norms is modelled on the practice of adjudication in common law reasoning, because through the mutual recognition of normative claims historical recollection of previous experience agents can identify the rules governing that experience and repair the mistakes and inconsistencies that are found along the way. In this special workshop, we discuss how Brandom’s Hegelian Model can contribute to resolving some controversial issues in contemporary jurisprudence, with a view to improving our understanding of the nature or law, the practice of interpretation, the adjudication of legal disputes, and the requirements of the rule of law.
Confirmed speakers:
Josh Nichols (McGill University, Canada)
Thomas Bustamante (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil)
Ziyu Liu (University of Cambridge, United Kindgom)
Damiano Canale and Giovanni Tuzet (Bocconi University, Italy) (coauthored paper)
Saulo de Matos (Federal University of Pará, Brazil)
Luca Malagoli (University of Genoa, Italy)
Emmanuel Voyiakis (London School of Economics, United Kindgom)
Thiago Lopes Decat (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil)
