Let’s talk about antinomies

Abstract

The author proposes new arguments in favor of Alchourron and Bulygin’s theory presented in Normative Systems (1971), by showing how even paradigmatic examples of instantiation conflicts can be reframed as antinomies between general cases. He proceeds as follows. After a brief reconstruction of Alchourron and Bulygin’s analysis of normative conflicts, he introduces the notion of instantiation conflict and shows how authors such as Riccardo Guastini, Jorge Rodriguez, Pablo Navarro and others rely on that notion for pointing out the existence of a “special” category of normative conflicts, which are necessarily bound to individual, actual cases and, therefore, fall out of the scope of Alchourron and Bulygin’s analysis. The author maintains that, should they be right, several fundamental assumptions of Alchourron and Bulygin’s theory might be seriously questioned. Against this background he argues that a reductionist approach is feasible and closes the paper by trying to save one of the main intuitions that inspired the instantiation conflicts argument.