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2026 Jotwell: J. Things We Like 1 (2026)

handle is hein.journals/jotwell2026 and id is 1 raw text is: Jurisprudence The Journal of Things We Like (Lots) https://juris.jotwell.com What is Naturalized Jurisprudence? Author : Kenneth Himma Date : January 4, 2026 Luka Burazin, NaturalizedJurisprudence, in Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law, (John Linarelli ed.) __ (forthcoming 2026), available at SSRN (Nov. 11, 2024). Luka Burazin's Naturalizedjurisprudence is an elegant discussion of the various movements to naturalize legal philosophy. Burazin differentiates between substantive and methodological naturalism, further distinguishing two types of substantive naturalism: Ontological naturalism is a view that philosophy should accept as real or actually existing only (in a broad sense) natural things, properties, entities and phenomena (i.e., those identified through the methods of empirical sciences).... Semantic naturalism is the view that a philosophical analysis of a concept must show it to be 'analyzable in terms that admit of empirical inquiry' (P. 1). In contrast, he explains methodological naturalism as the view that philosophical theorizing should abandon armchair theorizing on the basis of philosophers' intuitions and common-sense beliefs ('truisms'), thought experiments (hypothetical situations), and a priori conceptual analysis, and use instead the (empirical) methods of successful (natural and social) sciences and the scientific style of explanation. (P. 1.) It is worth noting at the outset that ontological naturalism, as stated here, appears to be inconsistent with the existence of propositional and non-propositional abstract objects, such as law, sets, and objective moral rules, which our linguistic practices assume exist, because picked out by noun-terms. If ontological naturalism is concerned to explain the world that we construct with our conceptual, mathematical, and evaluative practices, it seems to be a non-starter from the outset. If it is concerned with identifying some mind-independent truth, it seems unequipped to do so. While an ontological naturalist might, as Burazin points out, explain law in terms of human behaviour and mental states, there are two problems. First, since mental states are not publicly observable, an ontological approach would have to rely on verbal testimony that describes their mental states, evidence that might not always be available. Second, it is not clear that law and its associated practices can be adequately explained without relying on abstract non-naturalistic objects, like norms and systems. Burazin goes on to characterize American Legal Realism (ALR) as a form of methodological naturalism that advocates replacing conceptual and normative (justificatory) theories with empirical and descriptive theories (thus changing the goals of theoretical inquiries), or normative naturalism, which aims to regulate a certain human practice (e.g., of acquiring knowledge or adjudicating) but requires that normative theories be based on empirical findings on which normative recommendations can actually be followed by their addresses and can actually produce the desired effects (P. 2). In his view, ALR advocates abandoning normative theories of how judges should decide cases with empirical studies of judicial behavior that do no more than explain the judges' decisions in terms of their beliefs and inferences they make. Of course, this seems to require that we utterly abandon normative theorizing about legitimate judicial 1/3