Vico distinguished the merely certain from the rationally true 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
- DEFINE: The certain/true (certum/verum) distinction is a foundational epistemological concept: the certain is authority-backed but obscure, the true is illuminated by natural reason.
- XREF: Credibility/legitimacy versus truth recurs across the Islamophobia literature—e.g., how state authority can make claims ‘certain’ without their being ‘true’—tie to Gramsci’s broader hegemony/commonsense framework. — connects to: Vico distinguished empirical certainty from rational truth in law; Vico distinguished the certain (authority-backed) from the true (reason-illuminated) in law