TFL Vsebine / Revija Revus

The author proposes new arguments in favor of Alchourrón and Bulygin’s theory presented in Normative Systems (1971), by showing how even paradigmatic examples of instantiation conflicts can be reframed as antinomies between general cases. He proceeds as follows. After a brief reconstruction of Alchourrón and Bulygin’s analysis of normative conflicts, he introduces the notion of instantiation conflict and shows how authors such as Riccardo Guastini, Jorge Rodríguez, Pablo Navarro and others rely on that notion for pointing out the existence of a “special” category of normative conflicts, which are necessarily bound to individual, actual cases and, therefore, fall out of the scope of Alchourrón and Bulygin’s analysis. The author maintains that, should they be right, several fundamental assumptions of Alchourrón and Bulygin’s theory might be seriously questioned. Against this background he argues that a reductionist approach is feasible and closes the paper by trying to save one of the main intuitions that inspired the instantiation conflicts argument.