The Tapestry of Reason: Generality, Specificity and Legal Philosophy

• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12182

The Tapestry of Reason: Generality,

Specificity and Legal Philosophy

WILLIAM LUCY

Amalia Amaya’s The Tapestry of Reason is a scrupulous, comprehensive and admir-

ably clear investigation of the notion of coherence. It is interdisciplinary, in the

sense that it concentrates mainly upon philosophy, psychology and law, combining

the insights of the former two into a general theory that can be brought to bear

upon the latter. Almost all of the heavy lifting in the book is done in Chapters 3–9,

where a general conception of factual and normative coherence is constructed from

the discussion of coherence in a vast range of apparently different contexts, includ-

ing “epistemic justification, the justification of scientific beliefs, the justification of

belief changes, practical justification, moral justification and the justification

of interpretative beliefs” (Amaya 2015, 471). That list is from the first page of

Chapter 10, the penultimate chapter. That chapter brings all—or most—of what

has passed before to bear upon law.

In what follows I certainly do not want—and would hate to be interpreted as

attempting—to run down or in any way underplay the undoubted quality and

sheer quantity of very labour-intensive work that Amaya does in Chapters 3–9 of

the book. Instead, I pose this question: Is the penultimate chapter an odd place, in a

jurisprudence book, to find a sustained discussion of law? I think it is both odd and

unsurprising. In the course of unpacking that not-quite paradoxical thought,

I intend to vent another thought about what legal philosophy has become, or might

be becoming, and what it could be. I hope the ostensible but not intentional rude-

ness of using The Tapestry of Reason as a token for airing this general thought about

contemporary legal philosophy is excusable here, in an environment in which the

other commentators address more of the details of Amaya’s argument.

The structure of the book and the fact that law crops up, with the exception of

the jurisprudential problems sketched in Chapters 1 and 2, most sustainedly and

explicitly in the last substantive chapter, is eminently sensible in light of this

assumption or one like it: Understanding the nature of coherence in adjudication in

particular, and in law in general, requires a general interdisciplinary “theory” of

coherence. Once such a theory is constructed, we can understand law in light of it:

“[t]he guiding idea [is] that an analysis of coherence in a number of different

justificatory contexts will shed some light on the elusive notion of coherence and

V

C2017 The Authors. Ratio Juris V

C2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Ratio Juris. Vol. 30 No. 4 December 2017 (522–528)