Why do these Legal Philosophy textbooks write 'differential

English isn’t my first language; I don’t understand the difference between ‘differential’ and ‘different’ as adjectives. Why do these books use ‘differential’ as an adjective? Why not just write ‘different’?

  1. Stephen Darwall, Morality, Authority, and Law: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics I (2013), p 167.
  1. Jeffrie G. Murphy, Philosophy Of Law: An Introduction To Jurisprudence (2018), Anyone know the page number?
  1. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law (2012), p 579.
  1. Norman K. Denzin, Sociology of Law (2020) Anyone know the page number?

Hi scherz0,
Differential is not just different; it requires you take into account all the considerations, circumstances and issues for each option.
Justification for differential authority” for instance, requires you take into account everything that might come up about accepting that type of authority.

I think in legal, medical, mechanical, and maths terms “differential” refers to minute differences - often immeasurably small.

And then there’s this thing: iep.utm.edu/diff-ont/

It shows us just how impenetrable it can seem for some in trying to understand something like this “technically”.

Me, I’ll no doubt never master it “up there” myself.

Instead, all I can do is to ask those who think that they do have a handle on it to take their conclusions out into the world that we live in and, given a set of circumstances in which value judgments come into conflict, make specific references to it there.

“The circumstantial details that demand a significant difference.”

We’ll need a context of course.

This and a convincing argument that, given James S. Saint’s assessment of determinism, our own assessment of “differential” is or is not but the psychological illusion of free will given further that our brains wholly in sync with the laws of matter are such that any conclusions we make in regard to “differential” [legal or otherwise] we either were or were not able to opt of our own volition for another conclusion instead.

True. I should have said ‘minute’ differences but still these changes must be taken into consideration otherwise they could have just written ‘small’ or ‘minutely’ different.

PS: obsrvr are you Australian as PK claims? I thought you were British. If so, what state do you live in; just curious about your political surroundings.

As an adjective, differential is like the meta version of different. It means something along the lines of: able to differ, differing, or varying. Rather than implying difference from some particular example that might have already been mentioned.

Try the following translations to see if they make sense in context.

What can justify that authority relations should differ at all, in the first place?

If he had written ‘different’ one might have asked “different from what?” But his point isn’t about justifying specific types of authority, it’s about justifying how authority should vary or be able to vary in the first place. Something like that.

Varying treatment may clash with the principle…

(“different treatment” could be mistaken to mean “different than some treatment x” or “abnormal treatment”)

Differential is the basis for forming, thinking about, or categorizing differences. Different is just different: opposed to.

So differential diagnostics, in medicine, is when you try to find reasons to develop alternative diagnoses for a disease. Not just to think of different diagnoses at a whim. So maybe, in differential diagnostics, I see that a guy was diagnosed with flesh eating bacteria, but then I learn that he was possibly bitten by a snake. His being bit by a snake is the differential criteria to develop the alternative theory that his necrotic tissue is because of snake venom. Get it? So apply that same thing to legal questions instead of medicine.

I can only tell you what I take it to mean.

‘Differential claims’ seems to indicate a particular kind of claim that subdivides into different strengths of claim. Where there’s one kind of claim, or one basic theory of claims, it’s recognzing that some claims might be stronger than others within that account.

Contrast that with ‘different claims’, which suggests different kinds of claims or different theories of claims, or claims justified in different ways.