‘Emotional facts’ in virtual environments: epistemological and legal status

This chapter deals with the epistemological status of emotions, affectivity and qualitative aspects of perception in the legal sphere. It offers a critique of the fact/value, primary qualities/secondary qualities, external/internal, empirical/psychological, etc. dualisms that denote the modern and contemporary approach to the legal qualification of experiential situations. The critical path unfolds with particular reference to so-called virtual reality and the instances of AI. The focus of the analysis revolves around the contradictions of the activity of legal qualification with reference to these ‘new dimensions.’ The main purpose is to show how much these contradictions depend on the cultural/epistemic attempt to hide the affective/qualitative component and its determining role in the categorization of the ‘items’ that populate the virtual domain and its interpenetration with the physical ‘real’ world.