ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the Hart/Dworkin and Hart/Raz debates; this review is elementary, and may be safely bypassed by anyone familiar with the shape of that dialectic. It discusses questions of methodology in jurisprudence. The chapter turns to a larger debate about methodology that has come to the fore in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. It identifies some possible weaknesses of the descriptivist rebuttal to Finnis—the source of the "qualifications" previously noted—and argues for a different way of framing the methodology problem in jurisprudence. Gettier shed no light on the nature of knowledge, per se, though he shed considerable light on the epistemic intuitions common among people of a certain class in certain societies. Legal philosophers have been having the wrong debate about jurisprudential methodology: legal philosophy is, indeed, descriptive, and trivially so, in exactly the way most other branches of practical philosophy have an important descriptive component.
