Volume: 3 Issue: 2 (2025) Serial Number: 4

The paper develops a philosophical analysis of how the long-standing dispute between constructivist and realist metaethical frameworks can be reconstructed in a way that preserves moral pluralism without abandoning the aspiration to universal ethical claims. The research employs a mixed-method critical-analytical approach that integrates a structured synthesis of peer-reviewed literature published between 2014 and 2024, comparative analysis of the empirical research on folk moral objectivism, and conceptual decomposition of the foundational arguments that define the contemporary metaethical landscape. The central finding is that the realism- constructivism opposition, when carefully decomposed, separates into three analytically distinct dimensions — ontological, epistemological, and justificatory — and that the apparent intractability of the dispute is largely a consequence of treating these three dimensions as a single unified disagreement. The empirical record on folk moral objectivism, which documents that ordinary moral cognition is internally pluralistic rather than uniformly realist or constructivist, supports the analytical claim that no single metaethical framework can capture the full structure of moral thought without sacrificing important features that the alternative framework preserves. The original contribution of this article is the introduction of an integrative analytical framework — designated the framework of three-dimensional metaethical reconstruction — that distinguishes the ontological, epistemological, and justificatory dimensions of the realism- constructivism dispute and demonstrates that a substantively pluralist metaethics can be coherent if and only if it accepts realist commitments at one dimension, constructivist commitments at another, and a hybrid position at the third. The paper closes with implications for normative ethics, political philosophy, and the broader project of universal ethical theorising under conditions of cultural and ideological diversity. Methodological limitations include the necessary abstractness of conceptual reconstruction and the predominantly Anglophone scope of the source literature.

The article examines the mechanism by which Web of Science and Scopus indexation regimes function as instruments of converting linguistic into symbolic capital, and how this conversion produces structural inequality between dominant and peripheral language communities. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's analytical apparatus from Distinction and The Rules of Art, and engaging with contemporary scholarship on academic dependency, evaluation regimes, and epistemic coloniality, the analysis focuses on four small Slavic-language academic communities: Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), Slovenian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian. The original contribution of the article is the construction of the Linguistic Capital Conversion Asymmetry Index (LCAI), a new quantitative metric that operationalizes the disproportion between a language community's research-producing capacity and its symbolic recognition in dominant indexation systems. Preliminary application of LCAI to the four cases reveals a factor of asymmetry exceeding forty times when contrasted with the English-language baseline, with Ukrainian and Macedonian communities exhibiting the most severe conversion deficits. The analysis shows that small-language journals operate within a heteronomous field where symbolic legitimacy is allocated by external infrastructures whose evaluation criteria mirror the linguistic habitus of dominant Anglophone production, and where peripheral journals adopt strategies that range from forced linguistic assimilation to refusal-as-survival. The article argues that this conversion mechanism constitutes a form of epistemic coloniality not in the sense of direct imperial domination, but as the quiet operationalization of Bourdieu's logic of distinction at the level of the global scientific field. The paper closes with implications for evaluation policy in semi- peripheral national systems, particularly those that have made Scopus coverage a binding criterion for academic promotion and funding.

Članak ispituje preciznu teorijsku tvrdnju izvedenu iz socijalne ontologije Džona Serla — da deklarativni govorni činovi koji konstituišu „statusne funkcije” ne mogu opstati bez kolektivnog prihvatanja — i provjerava njene empirijske posljedice na dva paradigmatska slučaja spolja nametnutih institucionalnih arhitektura: Dejtonskom sporazumu u Bosni i Hercegovini i režimu transpozicije pravnih tekovina EU (acquis) u državama kandidatima Zapadnog Balkana. Originalni doprinos članka jeste konstrukcija Indeksa deficita kolektivnog prihvatanja statusnih funkcija (CASF), nove analitičke mjere koja za svaku instituciju kvantifikuje jaz između njene formalno deklarisane statusne funkcije i empirijski uočljivog nivoa kolektivnog prihvatanja među konstitutivnim kolektivima. Primijenjena na sedam ključnih dejtonskih institucija i tri klase institucija proisteklih iz acquis-a, mjera pokazuje da neke institucije (Ustavni sud Bosne i Hercegovine, Kancelarija visokog predstavnika) operišu na CASF vrijednostima koje se približavaju 0,7, što znači da se gotovo sedamdeset procenata njihovog formalnog autoriteta ne prevodi u prihvaćenu institucionalnu stvarnost. Analitički odjeljci pokazuju zašto to nije kontingentni neuspjeh reformi, već strukturna posljedica načina na koji se Serlov mehanizam deklaracije statusnih funkcija urušava kada je deklarator spoljašnji, a kolektivi kojima je deklaracija upućena nisu integrisani u konstitutivni intencionalni čin. Članak tvrdi da ono što se konvencionalno tumači kao „deficit vladavine prava” ili „zarobljena državnost” na Zapadnom Balkanu, na nivou socijalne ontologije, predstavlja deficit kolektivnog prihvatanja koji nikakva daljnja deklaracija ne može popraviti isključivo deklarativnim sredstvima. Rad se zaključuje implikacijama za institucionalni dizajn u postkonfliktnim društvima i za metodologiju proširenja EU, koja trenutno počiva na prećutnoj pretpostavci da je transpozicija acquis-a dovoljna za uspostavljanje institucionalne stvarnosti.

Članak ispituje preciznu teorijsko-empirijsku tezu koja se javlja na sjecištu Levinasove fenomenologije lica i biopolitičke realnosti balkanske migrantske rute u periodu 2015-2024. Levinas u Totalité et Infini (1969) i Autrement qu'être (1981) zasniva svoju etiku na susretu s licem Drugog kao događaju koji prethodi svakoj administrativnoj ili konceptualnoj redukciji; lice nameće asimetričnu, hiperbolicnu odgovornost koja odbija kategorizaciju. Ipak, sigurnosniaparatkoji upravlja balkanskom rutom — Frontex, nacionalna policija EU i ne-EU država članica, IOM- vođeni prihvatni centri, sistemi biometrijske registracije — djeluje upravo kroz kategorijalnu redukciju. Originalan doprinos članka je konstrukcija tipologije pet Levinasovskih modova zatvaranja lica, kojima sigurnosno-administrativniaparatsistematski transformiše fenomenološko lice u administrativni entitet. Pet modova su: (1) numerička redukcija (dodjela broja predmeta, brisanje vlastitog imena); (2) biometrijska fragmentacija (otisak prstiju, retina skeniranje, razdvajanje lica u mjerljive parametre); (3) jezička standardizacija (prevod kroz standardizovane forme i ovlaštene interpretere); (4) prostorna izolacija (zatvoreni prihvatni centri, isključene zone, “zamrzavanje” mobilnosti); (5) vremensko zaustavljanje (indefinitno čekanje, frozen status, postponiranje kao tehnika upravljanja). Članak primjenjuje ovu tipologiju empirijski na četiri studije slučaja duž rute — Lipa centar u Bosni i Hercegovini, Adaševci centar u Srbiji, hrvatsko-bosanski push-back režim, te slovensko-italijanski readmissions koridor — i pokazuje da ni jedan mod ne djeluje izolovano; svi formiraju integrisanaparatčiji kumulativni učinak je sistematska konverzija Levinasovskog lica u ono što ja zovem “administrativnim ostatkom”. Članak argumentuje da ova konverzija ne ukida etičku odgovornost — Levinas bi to predvidio — nego otkriva ono što ostaje od njegovog hiperbolicnog zahtjeva nakon što je lice birokratski reducirano: rezidualnu, asimetričnu obavezu koja se javlja upravo kao jaz između formalne procedure i etičkog događaja.

The article addresses a precise question that arises at the intersection of Miranda Fricker's theory of epistemic injustice and the ongoing automation of social-protection case- management systems across Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia: does the user lose her epistemic standing when she is categorised by an algorithm whose interpretive horizon she does not share, and whose categorical apparatus she cannot inspect? Drawing on Fricker's foundational distinction between testimonial injustice (a credibility deficit assigned to a speaker on the basis of identity-prejudice) and hermeneutical injustice (a structural deficit in shared interpretive resources that disadvantages a marginal group in articulating its experience), the article develops a typology of five modes of algorithmic epistemic closure through which automated case-management systems systematically reproduce both forms of injustice. The five modes are: (1) categorical translation, by which the user's narrative is compressed into pre-defined system fields that admit only of the kinds of testimony the algorithm can recognise; (2) calibration silencing, by which an algorithm trained on biased historical data systematically discounts certain classes of testimony as statistically less credible; (3) opacity, by which the black-boxed character of the model deprives the user of the interpretive resources required to make sense of the decision; (4) temporal compression, by which the speed of automated processing forecloses the space for nuance, contextualisation, and follow-up that human caseworkers would otherwise provide; and (5) appeal asymmetry, by which formal redress procedures presuppose a level of algorithmic literacy and infrastructural access that the affected user characteristically lacks. The typology is applied empirically to three documented cases — the Dutch SyRI welfare-fraud detection system, the United Kingdom's 2020 Ofqual A-level grading algorithm, and the Australian Robodebt automated debt-recovery scheme — drawing on the peer-reviewed analyses of these cases by van Bekkum and Borgesius (2021), Smith (2020), and Nikidehaghani, Andrew and Cortese (2023). The article argues that the five modes do not act in isolation; they form an integrated apparatus whose cumulative effect is the conversion of a person seeking social support into what I term an “algorithmically illegible subject” — a position from which neither testimony nor self-interpretation can be successfully advanced within the system as it stands.

The article develops the concept of residual theogony as a structural-morphological category for what persists, in the form of cosmological narratives and explanations, of the older theogonic narrative apparatus once its religious or mythological content has been formally abandoned. Drawing on the morphological framework articulated in Knežević (2024) — a framework that explicitly relates cosmology, evolution, and theogony as parallel morphological domains organised around the morpheme of the prauzrok (the primal cause) — the article applies the morphological method to a precise empirical-textual question: where, and in what specific forms, do theogonic structures persist in the cosmological literature of the post-2017 interval that has formed the immediate context of the contemporary debate? The original contribution of the article is the elaboration of residual theogony through a typology of five recurrent forms in which theogonic structures persist in formally naturalistic cosmological discourse: (1) singular origination, in which the Big Bang singularity functions as a structural analogue of the theogonic origin-from-nothing; (2) the generative void, in which eternal inflation, quantum vacuum fluctuation, and “creation from nothing” cosmologies function as structural analogues of the theogonic primordial chaos; (3) retroactive teleology, in which the anthropic principle and fine- tuning arguments function as structural analogues of theogonic providential ordering; (4) generative necessity, in which multiverse and modal-necessity arguments function as structural analogues of the classical theogonic “necessary being”; and (5) emergent self-organisation, in which contemporary emergence theory functions as a structural analogue of theogonic agency. The article argues that residual theogony is not, by itself, evidence either for or against a theistic interpretation of cosmology; it is a morphological observation about the structural inheritance of contemporary cosmological discourse from the older narrative apparatus that produced the cosmological imagination of European, Mediterranean, and broader Indo-European civilisations. The principal stakes of the concept lie in what it makes visible: the discursive depth at which contemporary scientific cosmology continues to operate within forms of narrative organisation whose origin lies in pre-scientific theogonic traditions, and the consequent inadequacy of any account of cosmological discourse that takes its formal naturalism at face value while ignoring the morphological substrate on which that naturalism is articulated. The article closes with implications for the philosophy of cosmology, for the science-and-religion dialogue, and for an extension of the morphological method beyond the immediate textual material.