Invariance in Legal Theory and How to Dance Comparative Laws. Probably the most central, pivotal and annoying problem in the innards of legal theory is finding a fixed point. Because legal theory does not enjoy any relationship with any mathematical ideals except by a type of borrowed occlusion, that is, by denying their usefulness within the legal empire, for why make even more impenetrable that which is protected by the power discourse? When John von Neumann in the 1930s began to read up on the economics of his day, he was a bit dismayed and wondered outloud whether economists had any clue that the maths they were using was about 300 years old. His first paper in economics borrowed a couple ideas from his contemporaries, and it changed the way economics was done from then on. Well, one of the guys Von Neumann borrowed from was Brouwer whos intuitionistic philosophical approach to mathematics falls in the direct lineage to category theory. One of Brouwers claim to immortality is his fixed point theorems. I just read a paper which has a bit of formality but is still readable entitled, Towards a General Description of Physical Invariance in Category Theory (2007) by Symons, J., Urenda,J. and Kreinovich, V. Ive been thinking a lot about legal and financial invariance and was happy to see that they were trundling down a similar path of ideas. Their point is that invariance in any real life physical discourse needs a fixed point! Then you can throw into your stainless steel mental algorithm the whole big rather arbitrary and choppy waters apparatus of transformations, coordinate systems, symmetries, kitchen sinks and out pops on the other side different worlds of operations, but all rather translatable into each other. Nozdick, the philosopher, apparently (I dont really know because once I read a book by him as a undergrad and didnt like it) uses invariance approaches in his philosophy, e.g., for this rule to be true of humans, it must be true in all possible universes where humans could exist -type of arguments. Upshot: if you want to do general comparison, play with the concept of invariance (some quantity that remains the same under a certain set of transformations) add the spice of life and the elixir of infinite contingencies, and out pops hypothetical beautiful dresses, a grand piano, French poetry, quantum information covariant, isomorphic and adjoint to gravity, kula as ring symmetry to global payment systems, many monsters, devil dancers and angelic choirs from heaven and hell. In other words, dont let the legal limits of the formalities of comparison fool you. The old Irish poet is still correct, the dancer is the dance.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 09:55:58 +0000
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