Whitehead, in two basic books, considers two different approaches to point-free geometry: the inclusion-based approach , whose primitive notions are regions and inclusion relation between regions, and the connection-based approach , where the connection relation is considered instead of the inclusion. We show that the latter cannot be reduced to the first one, although this can be done in the framework of multivalued logics.

Fricker shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be forcefully discussed.

In this paper, Plotinus' treatise On Dialectic I.3 [20] is discussed. In the first part of the paper, I argue that for Plotinus the importance of dialectic stands in the method of division that enables one to grasp the ‘what it is’. I present and examine some passages which contain a description of dialectic and an account of its activity. I then look into the reasons why Plotinus affirms the superiority of dialectic, as he conceived it, over logic, as the (...) Peripatetics and the Stoics conceived it. The second part of the paper explores the relation between dialectic and truth and that between dialectic and soul: in this discussion Plotinus offers some interesting and more original epistemological remarks. (shrink)

This article uses data from the 2020 TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index to show that many American families were financially fragile well before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. economy. Financial fragility is particularly severe among specific demographic groups, such as African-Americans and those with low income. The article also shows that financial fragility is strongly linked to financial literacy and that many Americans are ill-equipped to deal with the financial decisions needed to navigate through a financial crisis. Suggestions are (...) provided to deal with personal finance decisions in times of emergency. (shrink)

When we hope to explain and perhaps vindicate a practice that is internally diverse, philosophy faces a methodological challenge. Such subject matters are likely to have explanatorily basic features that are not necessary conditions. This prompts a move away from analysis to some other kind of philosophical explanation. This paper proposes a paradigm based explanation of one such subject matter: blame. First, a paradigm form of blame is identified—‘Communicative Blame’—where this is understood as a candidate for an explanatorily basic form (...) of blame. Second, its point and purpose in our lives is investigated and found to reside in its power to increase the alignment of the blamer and the wrongdoer's moral understandings. Third, the hypothesis that Communicative Blame is an explanatorily basic form of blame is tested out by seeing how far other kinds of blame can reasonably be understood as derivative, especially in respect of blame's point and purpose. Finally, a new and quasi-political worry about blame is raised. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to three commentaries on Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. In response to Alcoff, I primarily defend my conception of how an individual hearer might develop virtues of epistemic justice. I do this partly by drawing on empirical social psychological evidence supporting the possibility of reflective self-regulation for prejudice in our judgements. I also emphasize the fact that individual virtue is only part of the solution – structural mechanisms also have an essential role (...) in combating epistemic injustice. My response to Goldberg principally concerns my perceptual account of the epistemology of testimony, which I defend as being both well-motivated and best categorized as a species of non-inferentialism. I also explain its relation to the reductionism/non-reductionism contrast, and defend my resistance to casting it as any kind of default view. In response to Hookway, I contrast discriminatory with distributive forms of epistemic injustice, and defend the basic taxonomy I present in the book, which casts testimonial and hermeneutical injustice as the two fundamental discriminatory forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

There are two kinds of forgiveness that appear as radically different from one another: one presents forgiveness as essentially earned through remorseful apology; the other presents it as fundamentally non-earned—a gift. The first, which I label Moral Justice Forgiveness, adopts a stance of moral demand and conditionality; the second, which I label Gifted Forgiveness, adopts a stance of non-demand and un-conditionality. Each is real; yet how can two such different responses to wrongdoing be of one and the same kind? This (...) paper explains how, by showing that the basic role each plays in moral-social life is the same; and that one is conceptually and therefore historically prior to the other. The result is pluralism, with each kind of forgiveness represented as distinctive in both its psychology and its normativity; and yet an ordered pluralism—with Moral Justice Forgiveness revealed as the root kind, and Gifted Forgiveness a culturally contingent iteration. (shrink)

Pila (2009) has criticised the recommendations made by requirements engineers involved in the design of a grid technology for the support of distributed readings of mammograms made by Jirotka et al. (2005). The disagreement between them turns on the notion of “biographical familiarity” and whether it can be a sound basis for trust for the performances of professionals such as radiologists. In the first two sections, this paper gives an interpretation of the position of each side in this disagreement and (...) their recommendation for the design of technology for distributed reading, and in the third the underlying reasons for this is agreement are discussed. It is argued that Pila, in attempting to make room for mistrust as well as trust, brings to the fore the question of having and reflecting upon reasons for trust or mistrust. Pila holds that biographical familiarity is not a sound reason for trust/mistrust, as it seems to obliterate the possibility of mistrust. In response to her proposal, an analysis is proposed of the forms of trust involved in biographical familiarity. In particular, implicit trust is focused upon — as a form of trust in advance of reasons, and as a form of trust contained (in the logical sense) within other reasons. It is proposed that implicit trust has an important role in establishing an intersubjectively shared world in which what counts as a reason for the acceptability of performances such as readings of X-rays is established. Implicit trust, therefore, is necessary for professionals to enter into a “space of reasons”. To insist upon judgements made in the absence of the form of implicit trust at play in biographical familiarity is to demand that radiologists (and other relevantly similar professionals) make judgements regarding whether to trust or mistrust on the basis of reasons capable of being reflected upon, but at the same time leave them without reasons upon which to reflect. (shrink)

A controversial issue in Rousseau’s philosophy is the relationship between the people as a whole, who want the good but cannot see it, and individuals, who see the good but do not want it. This predicament has to be overcome by the Legislator, whose characteristics seem however to be inconsistent with the theory propounded in the first book of the Contrat Social. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the current debate by exploring three possible functions of this (...) key figure, which are 1. to formulate the content of constitutional law; 2. to make the people aware of their sovereignty by bringing to light the rules underlining the social contract; 3.to mediate between the political and the socio-economic sphere, that is between the sovereign people’s efforts to bring about the general will and individuals’ efforts to advance their own particular interest. Being structurally different from the first two, this last hypothesis need not be seen as conflicting with either of them. (shrink)

Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism—the ‘relativism of distance’. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical. I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our (...) lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate—moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance. (shrink)

This paper discusses the fallacies of combination and division as they are presented by Aristotle in chapter 4 of his Sophistici Elenchi. Aristotle's examples are concise, their discussion is unclear, and it is difficult to distinguish the cases of combination from those of division. I analyse the Aristotelian examples and the interpretations offered so far. I show that these interpretations suffer from a major defect: they fail to identify a common characteristic whereby the Aristotelian examples can be classified as instances (...) of combination or division. In my reconstruction of the examples, I repair this deficiency: I give a single pattern of explanation for the fallacy of combination and another (similar) pattern for the fallacy of division. Thus, it is possible to free Aristotle from the following charges: (i) he did not clearly distinguish between combination and division, and (ii) he reduced combination and division to a single fallacy. My explanation of the fallacies uses the notion of scope of an expression: in modern terminology, the fallacy of combination can be described as ?fallacy of the wide scope?, the fallacy of division as ?fallacy of the narrow scope? (shrink)

In recent years, the contribution of various disciplines and professionals (i.e. from marketing, computer science, psychology and pedagogy) to museum management has encouraged the development of a new conception of museology. Specifically, psychology has affected the overall conception of museum and the visitors towards a more holistic vision of the museum experience as a complexity of memory, personal drives, group identity, meaning-making process, as well as leisure preferences. In this regard, psychological research contributes to advance the scientific knowledge about psychological (...) and social phenomena related to the visitor experience, as well as to design innovative technologies and future tourism services. The present contribution discusses the Socio-Cultural Activity Theory as a theoretical framework to conceptualize the museum visit as an activity mediated by the technology, and to better identify the factors shaping the interaction between the visitors and the technologies. To do so, a case study is presented: a qualitative research performed at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome (Italy) to analyze the visitor experience of a tour that integrates augmented and virtual reality. Information derived from applying Activity Theory on visitors’ experience highlight the value of technology as mediating tool between the museum mission and the visitor experience, considering the interaction between visitors’ characteristics, museum environmental dimensions and technology’s features. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 2 Seiten: 129-155.

How is time framed in corporate social responsibility (CSR) talk? The literature mostly fails to analyze how multiple CSR activities are framed from a temporal perspective. Moreover, those researchers who undertake temporal framing tend to overlook the role of home-country cultural characteristics. Using a mixed-method analysis of 2,720 CSR reports from developing country companies, we show that CSR talk is mostly framed in the future tense when firms communicate complex human rights issues such as slavery or child labor, while the (...) past and present tenses are more frequent when they report on philanthropy and other cause-related activities. We find that these effects are stronger when firms are from countries characterized by greater uncertainty avoidance. We contribute to the CSR communication literature by showing that temporal references in CSR talk tend to differ, depending on the company-level control of CSR activities, and by highlighting uncertainty avoidance’s role as a boundary condition for aspirational talk’s performativity. (shrink)

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political (...) significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom. (shrink)

Ethical concerns in e-social science are often raised with respect to privacy, confidentiality, anonymity and the ethical and legal requirements that govern research. In this article, the authors focus on ethical aspects of e-research that are not directly related to ethical regulatory framework or requirements. These frameworks are often couched in terms of benefits or harms that can be incurred by participants in the research. The authors shift the focus to the sources of value in terms of which benefits or (...) harms are understood in real social situations. A central claim of this paper is that the technologies that are used for research are not value neutral, but serve to reinforce some values at the expense of others. The authors discuss databases, modelling and simulation, network analysis as examples of technologies which affect the articulation of values. A view of e-social science as a techno-scientific constellation of researchers, technologies and society, in which values are always already embedded, is put forward as a basis for a view of ethics as reflexive and active engagement, conducted with awareness. Methodological pluralism and proactive openness are also proposed as responses to this view of the ethical dimensions of e-social science. (shrink)

Since the 1980s, several studies of visual perception have persuasively argued that important aspects of human vision are best accounted for not by recourse to inner mental representations but rather through socially observable actions and behaviors (e.g. Lynch 1985, Latour 1986, Lynch 1990, Goodwin 1994, Goodwin 1997, Sharrock & Coulter 1998). While there are clearly physiological mechanisms required for vision, psychological accounts of perception in terms of inner mental representations have been dislodged from their position as the basic term in (...) the interface between human beings and their environment and replaced with terms such as "social practice," and "vernacular intelligibility." The focus for these .. (shrink)

Interpreting Bernard Williams’s ethical philosophy is not easy. His style is deceptively conversational; apparently direct, yet argumentatively inexplicit and allusive. He is moreover committed to evading ready-made philosophical “-isms.” All this reinforces the already distinct impression that the structure of his philosophy is a web of interrelated commitments where none has unique priority. Against this impression, however, I will venture that the contours of his philosophy become clearest if one considers that there is a single, unchanging root conviction from which (...) his ethical philosophy grows. Despite the perpetual motion of his philosophical thought—its erudition, originality, range, and unceasing forward momentum—still, I contend, there is something unchanging at the heart of it. I will show this by reference to three signature theses: internal reasons, the relativism of distance, and the porous borders of philosophy and history. I will argue that the root conviction of which these are the fruits is the conviction that the constraints of universal rationality seriously underdetermine how one should live. This, I believe, is the vision of the human ethical condition that constitutes the largely inexplicit yet utterly fundamental presupposition beneath Williams’s ethical philosophy taken as a whole. I label the object of this root conviction ethical freedom, and thus portray Williams as a philosopher of ethical freedom. (shrink)

Most of the essential cellular components, like nucleic acids, lipids and sugars, are phosphorylated. The phosphate equilibrium in Escherichia coli is regulated by the phosphate (Pi) input from the surrounding medium. Some 90 proteins are synthesized at an increased rate during Pi starvation and the global control of the cellular metabolism requires cross‐talk with other regulatory mechanisms. Since the Pi concentration is normally low in E. coli's natural habitat, these cells have devised a mechanism for synthesis of about 15 proteins (...) to accomplish two specific functions: transport of Pi and its intracellular regulation. The synthesis of these proteins is controlled by two genes (the phoB‐phoR operon), involving both negative and positive functions. PhoR protein is a histidine protein kinase, induced in Pi starvation and is a transmembrane protein. It phosphorylates the regulator protein PhoB which is also Pi starvation‐induced. The PhoB phosphorylated form binds specifically to a DNA sequence of 18 nucleotides (the pho Box), which is part of the promoters of the Pho genes. The genes controlled by phoB constitute the Pho regulon.The repression of phoA (the gene encoding alkaline phosphatase) by high Pi concentrations in the medium requires the presence of an intact Pst operon (pstS, pstC, pstA, pstB and phoU) and phoR. The products of pstA and pstC are membrane bound, whereas the product of pstS is periplasmic and PstB and PhoU proteins are cytoplasmic. The function of the PhoU protein may be regulated by cofactor nucleotides and may be involved in signaling the activation of the regulon via PhoR. (shrink)

The collaborative ‹Big Science’ approach prevalent in physics during the mid- and late-20th century is becoming more common in the life sciences. Often computationally mediated, these collaborations challenge researchers’ trust practices. Focusing on the visualisations that are often at the heart of this form of scientific practice, the paper proposes that the aesthetic aspects of these visualisations are themselves a way of securing trust. Kant’s account of aesthetic judgements in the Third Critique is drawn upon in order to show that (...) the image-building capability of imagination, and the sensus communis, both of which are integral parts of aesthetic experience, play an important role in building and sustaining community in these forms of science. Kant’s theory shows that the aesthetic appeal of scientific visualisations is not isolated from two other dimensions of the visualisations: the cognitive-epistemic, aesthetic-stylistic and interpersonal dimensions, and that in virtue of these inter-relationships, visualisations contribute to building up the intersubjectively shared framework of agreement which is basic for trust. (shrink)

Certain strands of modern literature and philosophy have laid pronounced emphasis upon the impossibility of sharing the experience of dying: in the face of death, all social bonds dissolve and the human being finds himself in the deepest and most inescapable of solitudes. Greek myth, however, depicts stories in which death is physically shared by two individuals, or magically transferred from one individual to another: such stories provide a fascinating starting point for comparing ancient and modern views on the same (...) problem, or, rather, for exploring ancient perspectives on a modern problem. This article takes as its premise the idea that ‘death’ as an abstract notion is a human construct, and argues that feelings and questions associated with death, such as that of its inexorable power to isolate the dying person psychologically from the rest of mankind, are not intrinsic to the phenomenon, but instead determined by culture. (shrink)

In recent years a growing number of scholars in science studies and related fields are developing new ontologies to displace entrenched dualisms. These efforts often go together with a renewed interest in the roles played by symbolisms and tools in knowledge and being. This article brings Maurice Merleau-Ponty into these conversations, positioning him as a precursor of today’s innovative recastings of technoscience. While Merleau-Ponty is often invoked in relation to his early work on the body and embodiment, this article focuses (...) on his later work, where the investigation of perception is integrated with an ontological exploration. The resulting approach revolves around the highly original idea of the body as a standard of measurement. We further develop this idea by coining the term ‘the measuring body’, which to a greater extent than did Merleau-Ponty accentuates the relative autonomy of symbolisms and tools and their capacity to decentre the perceiving body. (shrink)

We gain information from collective, often institutional bodies all the time—from the publications of committees, news teams, or research groups, from web sites such as Wikipedia, and so on—but do these bodies ever function as genuine group testifiers as opposed to mere group sources of information? In putting the question this way I invoke a distinction made, if briefly, by Edward Craig, which I believe to be of deep significance in thinking about the distinctiveness of the speech act of testimony. (...) The distinction is that between somebody’s functioning as a ‘good informant’ and their functioning merely as a ‘source of information’. The difference between these has, as he remarks, a crucial ethical aspect: What I have in mind is the special flavour of situations in which human beings treat each other as subjects with a common purpose, rather than as objects from which services, in this case true belief, can be extracted. In this paper I shall try to bring out the distinctive nature of the role of good informant in a way that helps to clarify what is at stake in asking whether there can be group testimony in the sense of genuinely collective testimony—that is to say, where the group testifier is a collective and not merely a sum of individuals testifying in one or another form of aggregated chorus. (shrink)

The dual aim of this article is to reveal and explain a certain phenomenon of epistemic injustice as manifested in testimonial practice, and to arrive at a characterisation of the anti–prejudicial intellectual virtue that is such as to counteract it. This sort of injustice occurs when prejudice on the part of the hearer leads to the speaker receiving less credibility than he or she deserves. It is suggested that where this phenomenon is systematic it constitutes an important form of oppression. (...) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

In clinical practice, decision-making is not performed by individual knowers but by an assemblage of people and instruments in which no one member has full access to every piece of evidence. This is due to decision making teams consisting of members with different kinds of expertise, as well as to organisational and time constraints. This raises important questions for the epistemology of medicine, which is inherently social in this kind of setting, and implies epistemic dependence on others. Trust in these (...) contexts is a highly complex social practice, involving different forms of relationships between trust and reasons for trust: based on reasons, and not based on reasons; based on reasons that are easily accessible to reflection and others that are not. In this paper, we focus on what it means to have reasons to trust colleagues in an established clinical team, collectively supporting or carrying out every day clinical decision-making. We show two important points about these reasons, firstly, they are not sought or given in advance of a situation of epistemic dependence, but are established within these situations; secondly they are implicit in the sense of being contained or nested within other actions that are not directly about trusting another person. The processes of establishing these reasons are directly about accomplishing a task, and indirectly about trusting someone else’s expertise or competence. These processes establish a space of reasons within which what it means to have reasons for trust, or not, gains a meaning and traction in these team-work settings. Based on a qualitative study of decision-making in image assisted diagnosis and treatment of a complex disease called pulmonary hypertension (PH), we show how an intersubjective framework, or ‘space of reasons’ is established through team members forging together a common way of identifying and dealing with evidence. In dealing with images as a central diagnostic tool, this also involves a common way of looking at the images, a common mode or style of perception. These frameworks are developed through many iterations of adjusting and calibrating interpretations in relation to those of others, establishing what counts as evidence, and ranking different kinds of evidence. Implicit trust is at work throughout this process. Trusting the expertise of others in clinical decision-making teams occurs while the members of the team are busy on other tasks, most importantly, building up a framework of common modes of seeing, and common ways of identifying and assessing evidence emerge. It is only in this way that trusting or mistrusting becomes meaningful in these contexts, and that a framework for epistemic dependence is established. (shrink)

Late archaic lyric poetry tends to obscure all pathetic and tragic elements of Achilles’ destiny present in the Iliad. The offence against his honour, his grief for Patroclus, his yearning for native Phthia, and a painful awareness of being ὠκύμορος – none of these themes play a role in the passages of Pindar, Bacchylides or Simonides where Achilles is mentioned. Yet each of these three poets operates differently with regard to the epic source, and it is worth investigating how they (...) do so. (shrink)

Knowledge does not float free of the technologies available for its production and presentation. The intimate connection between ideas and praxis - embodied, technological, social - exemplified in any knowledge practice is, in the terms of Ihde & Selinger (2004), an 'epistemology engine'. This refers to the material-semiotic connections that obtain for any specific rendering of an idea. Often this material-semiotic connection is easier to recognise in the case of art than in that of knowledge, where it appears more-or-less obvious (...) that the rendering of an idea in poetic rather than prose form, in musical rather than linguistic form, in plastic rather than digital form, makes a difference to the idea. However, it is also recognisable (if not always actually recognised) in science, where there is a keen awareness of visual media alongside or instead of discursive media. -/- Ideas on the Internet shift and change as they pass through different networks of meaning production and communication, in different media and modalities. Different disciplines and modes of knowledge have either embraced these possibilities of transmogrification or remained aloof. Philosophy is one of the latter, and seems still steadily rooted to the discursive world. However, as a discipline, it overlaps in interesting ways both with science and with art. What are the epistemology-engines that apply to philosophy, and are there specific philosophy-engines? This is the background against which the applications to e-learning in philosophy will be considered. -/- In previous work, I claimed that the nature of philosophical argument cannot simply be assumed to remain constant even in the use of relatively simple discursive technologies such as discussion boards (Carusi 2006). In the present paper I consider a range of other technologies that form the technological culture of philosophy, or which mediate it. The paper aims to open a line of enquiry into these underlying technologies and the kinds of philosophy-engine that emerge from them, individually or by way of a convergence of a set of technologies. In particular, I focus on text-mining techniques, visualisations, and modeling showing what potential they have for disturbing, derailing, re-shaping or transforming the mode, form or substance of philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

As data-intensive and computational science become increasingly established as the dominant mode of conducting scientific research, visualisations of data and of the outcomes of science become increasingly prominent in mediating knowledge in the scientific arena. This position piece advocates that more attention should be paid to the epistemological role of visualisations beyond their being a cognitive aid to understanding, but as playing a crucial role in the formation of evidence for scientific claims. The new generation of computational and informational visualisations (...) and imaging techniques challenges the philosophy of science to re-think its position on three key distinctions: the qualitative/quantitative distinction, the subjective/objective distinction, and the causal/non-causal distinction. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between rational authority and social power, proceeding by way of a philosophical genealogy derived from Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. The position advocated avoids the errors both of the 'traditionalist' (who regards the socio-political as irrelevant to epistemology) and of the 'reductivist' (who regards reason as just another form of social power). The argument is that a norm of credibility governs epistemic practice in the state of nature, which, when socially manifested, is (...) likely to imitate the structures of social power. A phenomenon of epistemic injustice is explained, and the politicizing implication for epistemology educed. (shrink)

[T]he dominated live in a world structured by others for their purposes — purposes that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees inimical to our development and even existence.We are perhaps used to the idea that there are various species of oppression: political, economic, or sexual, for instance. But where there is the phenomenon that Nancy Hartsock picks out in saying that the world is “structured” by the powerful to the detriment of the (...) powerless, there is another species of oppression at work, one that has not been registered in mainstream epistemology: epistemic oppression. The word ‘structured’ may be read materially, so as to imply that social institutions and practices favour the powerful, or ontologically, so as to imply that the powerful somehow constitute the world. But for present purposes I am interested only in an epistemological reading, which implies that the powerful have some sort of unfair advantage in “structuring” our understandings of the social world. I will try to present an account of what this initially vague idea involves. I hope thereby to explain an exact sense in which the powerful can have a kind of epistemic advantage that means the powerless are epistemically oppressed. (shrink)

Desde sus inicios, la globalización se ha manifestado como un acontecimiento de alcance extraordinario, sobre todo para la superación de las distancias de relaciones y valores entre los individuos. La globalización ha ampliado los espacios de reglamentación, pero ha puesto de manifiesto también como la hiperproducción normativa se corresponde con una inadecuación de las normas para solucionar los problemas sociales complejos. De ahí el conflicto o la “contradicción” creciente entre derecho y sociedad, así como la incapacidad del derecho para producir (...) justicia o hacer justicia, en el sentido de colmar la distancia entre los individuos y entre los individuos y las instituciones. La respuesta aparentemente resolutiva de dicha problemática ha venido de la praxis, de la multiplicación de instrumentos mediadores, que parecen poder detener la situación de emergencia generalizada que caracteriza hoy el mundo de la justicia. La mediación es, al mismo tiempo, el resultado de un proceso radical de innovación en la regulación y de gestión de la conflictividad, y una modalidad comunicativa de las nuevas expectativas de justicia social e individual. (shrink)

The author analyses the legal culture of our time trying to make explicit the dynamics that form the basis of the present socio-normative order through an examination of the essential changes in the world of norms and of regulations in general. In particular, the analysis focusses on the structural transformation of law and on the loss of the traditional space-time dimension of regulation in the context of globalization. In the second place, she indicates the changes in the forms of communication (...) such as the fundamental presuppositions from which the problem of the new rights is tackled. The conclusion is that the regulating and directive function of pre-global law is losing ground to new resolution techniques such as mediation. (shrink)