ABSTRACT
How does one find the world? It is not immediately obvious what the question means to be asking since the word “finding” is ambiguous in several ways. It is, first of all, subject to a “noun-verb” ambiguity insofar as the word “finding” is used both as a verb to refer to an activity (process) of finding out and as a noun to designate the resulting object (product) that is found. It is in the latter sense that the word “finding” is used in the scientific and legal arenas. A scientific finding reports on an object that has been found or a force that has been discovered. Prior to the finding, the fact of the matter existed; it just had not yet been found. The result of a juridical finding, by contrast, has a different ontological status. For someone with the appropriate legal authority, it is the performative speech act of “finding someone guilty” that makes it true that a defendant is, in fact, guilty, prior to which time she was presumed innocent. Thus, while both a scientific and a legal finding make a claim about some feature of the world, the former is the result of a discovery and the latter a determination, both a resolution of will and a constitution of social fact.
