For a dogmatics of nescience: elements for an epistemology of uncertainty applied to administrative law

Abstract

The text outlines an overview of uncertainty and indeterminacy in administrative law, utilizing the category of nescience for this purpose. It discusses what would be an appropriate taxonomy of different types of uncertainty, starting from the unifying category of nescience. It highlights that there are various degrees and types of uncertainty; that the modalities of non-knowledge are plural; that the versions of cognitive lacks and refusals are distinct. It focuses on the specific problem of the different levels or profiles at which it materializes, including the figures of nescience of the general, the particular, and the determinations. It emphasizes that the problem of (in)determinacy of the law is just one of the levels or ranges at which the problem of nescience is materialized. Indeterminacy is merely one species, of a genre corresponding to non-knowledge or nescience. The argument progresses to assert the need for the dogmatics of the law to take the problem of non-knowledge more seriously, refining the criteria of decidability to confront situations, which are quite habitual, if not inherent, in which this problem presents itself. At the base of this reflection lies the understanding that administrative law is a particularly fertile field for this type of discussion, considering the types of problems that the discipline and its scholars typically face — problems that rarely confine themselves to the strictly formal-linguistic domain.