Tipo, tipicità, atipicità nella pragmatica dell'atto giuridico

The classification of phenomena into different types is constitutive of every scientific inquiry. But what is a type? What is the peculiarity of the concept of “type” compared with other classificatory concepts (the concepts of “class”, of “universal”, of “concept”, for instance)? And what is the relationship between a type and its concrete occurrences? In the present book, two researches intersect: the epistemological research on the specificity of the concepts of “type” and “prototype” in the theory of categorization, and the research on the role of type and typicalness in the theory of legal acts. The relationship between a type and its occurrences reveals, in legal phenomena, a peculiar normative force: on the one side, it is through the type of a legal act that the rules applying to every occurrence of that act are defined; on the other side, it is through the type of a legal act that the effects produced by every occurrence of that act are determined. In some contexts, a legal act has in its type its proper condition of possibility. Through the analysis of the normative function of types, the author examines the role played by types in the structure of social behaviour, in an inquiry that transcends the limits of the theory of categorization and the theory of legal acts, to provide original contributions to the philosophy of institutional phenomena and to social ontology.