Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores partly by means of a philosophically and legally informed engagement with the cultural incommensurabilist viewpoint. It is more substantively by a sustained positive theorizing of the very nature of thought and practice the capacity of the modern liberal legal system, through its agents, to understand or conceptualize the thought and practice of culturally different people. The book implicates a more general reflection on and explication of the cross-cultural potential of the state and its agents at large. It provides a degree of concrete legal context for that discussion by presenting an overview of an area of law within which the judicial understanding of culturally different action is commonly pursued in a number of common law jurisdictions that of indigenous land title law. The book commences with a simple theory of action informed by certain widely held ideas within contemporary analytic philosophy.