On the High Open Sea Computational Empiricism and the Naturalization of Law

The paper projects into the legal universe a topic, the overcoming of the divisions between natural and social sciences, long central in philosophical debate. Fed by a longstanding research trajectory intersecting law, complexity theory, and computational social sciences, it advocates for a vision where law is conceptualized and studied in empirical terms as a natural phenomenon, a part of natural’s world complexity in all its relations with the many levels of reality – from individual cognitive mechanisms to social macro dynamics – playing a role in its emergence and evolution. Cornerstone of the proposal is the ability of computational heuristics and methods to foster new ways to empirically understand reality; what Paul Humphreys, the philosopher of science, terms ‘computational empiricism’. Laden with profound epistemological and methodological implications, this approach lays the groundwork for a research agenda convincingly non-disciplinary, open to radical questions and, to a large extent, yet to be built.