Decriptare criptòtipi

Rodolfo Sacco’s research on “mute law” assumes supreme importance for the legal philosopher: it offers new categories for the inquiry into those legal phenomena which operate in absence of language. The concept of “cryptotype”, particularly, allows to investigate the phenomenon of non-verbal and non-verbalized rules, thus falsifying the widespread opinion that rules are linguistic entities. The present paper offers three original contributions to this research: firstly, it proposes the concept of “unconscious nomotropism” (that is, acting with reference to a rule with no real consciousness of that rule); secondly, it investigates the means for inferring a cryptotype from the observation of action (of unconscious nomotropic action); thirdly, (starting from a phenomenon described by Herodotus) it proposes the concept of an “extra-linguistic semiotic code” to give account of “mute” transcultural legal interaction.