An Anatomy of Injustice in the Emergence of Knowledge Among Heterogeneous Systems: A Preliminary Discussion in Generative Relational Terms of the Diplomatic Case

Abstract

A claim made by one party to another travels a course before it becomes anything the two hold in common. It is rendered into an event, construed at the far end by procedures the sending party does not run, registered or left unregistered in whatever description the parties share, admitted or refused at its source, and possibly carried onward by others. This paper takes that course as an anatomy and asks what may fail at each of its sites, distinguishing a failure of the operation from an alteration of the rule under which it is performed, the second of which escapes an inspection of what the site produced. Three results are reported. An assessment counting the occasions on which a claim appears to have been received as sent returns its highest values where the shared description has least capacity to hold a divergence. Reach obtained through intermediaries is purchased at the cost of fidelity, with no step on the route performed badly. And a complaint that a divergence went unregistered is unregistrable in the description whose incapacity it concerns. Two of the failures identified obtain where no party refuses anything and no collective resource for interpretation is deficient, which places them outside the categories the existing literature supplies; the absence of a perpetrator is taken from Fricker, and what is added is that the coarseness of a shared description follows from its being shared and requires no inequality. The final part treats the standing to raise a complaint and the forms of remedy available where the parties have accorded no third party the office of characterising their conduct. The account is stated in constraint form, and it proposes no further criterion of the kind its companion papers carry.