Reciprocal Illumination: Epistemological Necessity or Ontological Destiny? Some Preliminary Remarks

This paper explores two different but intimately linked concepts. First, there is “reciprocal illumination”, or the relation of interdependence of the object of knowledge and its subject. Second is the “irreversibility” which characterizes the process of applying constitutive rules, which causes institutional facts to become facts, and to be even stricter and more epistemologically constant than brute facts.