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

Résumé

The text seeks to outline an overview of uncertainty and indeterminacy in administrative law, relying on the category of nescience. It discusses what an appropriate taxonomy of the different types of uncertainty would be, based on the unifying category of nescience. It focuses on the specific issue of the different levels or profiles in which it materializes, covering the figures of nescience of the general, the particular, and of determinations. The argument progresses by affirming the need for legal dogmatics to take the problem of ignorance more seriously, refining the criteria of decidability to address situations that are somewhat common, if not inherent, where this problem arises. At the core of this reflection lies the understanding that administrative law is a particularly fertile ground for this type of discussion, considering the types of problems that the discipline and its scholars usually encounter—problems that rarely remain confined to the strictly formal-linguistic domain.