Vico distinguished empirical certainty from rational truth in law
Evidence
This distinction was made by Vico, in his Scienza Kuova of 1725. Para. 321: “The ‘certain’ in the laws is an obscurity of judgement backed only by authority, so that we find them harsh in application, yet are obliged to apply them just because they are certain. In good Latin certum means particularised, or, as the schools say, individuated; so that, in over-elegant Latin, certum and commune , the certain and the common, are opposed to each other.” Para. 324: “The true in the laws is a certain light and splendour with which natural reason illuminates them; so that jurisconsults are often in the habit of saying verum est for aequum est .” Para. 137: “Men who do not know what is true of things take care to hold fast to what is certain, so that, if they cannot satisfy their intellects by knowledge (scienza ), their wills at least may rest on consciousness (coscienza ).” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1851
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Vico’s certum/verum distinction — the certain is authority-backed and particular, the true is reason-illuminated and universal — is a foundational conceptual pair.
- XREF: This certum/verum distinction connects to Gramsci’s use of ‘common sense’ vs.‘good sense’ elsewhere in the Notebooks, and to the scaffolding of commonsense-as-hegemonic-knowledge in the Islamophobia toolkit.