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Abstract
Does Holmes’s social inductivism have an account of validation, or the justification of legal knowledge? Holmes viewed struggle as inevitable. Conflicts of principle imply social problems, which must somehow be resolved. War was the result of failure of resolution by consensual means. This implies a radical dialectic in the growth of human knowledge. Unlike Hegel, and analytical pragmatist writers like Robert Brandom, Holmes fully naturalizes the dialectic. Validation is radically inductive; it lies in the growth of knowledge by empirical and cooperative solution of human problems. Holmes is among the few writers who have elaborated the relevance of conflict to human knowledge, and is the first to introduce a conflict model of empiricism and logical induction. His famous skepticism adds a cautionary realism to Mill’s meliorism, emphasizing the precarious nature of the human endeavor. Its meliorist dimension lies in the insight that human conflict is not inherently violent and grounded in vengeance, but has itself been subject to transformation, as reflected in the evolution of liability in English common law. Restraint and humility in the face of yet-incomplete experience provides the only reliable path for judges in intractable controversies, and ultimately for the survival and flourishing of the human race.
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