Critical Analysis of the Hypothesis About the Usefulness of the Idea of Conceptual Metaphor in the Interpretation of Law

Keywords: metaphor, phraseological association, conceptual motivation, radial structures, legal reasoning, legal cognition, interpretation of law

English abstract: Since George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published a book entitled Metaphors We Live By, metaphors and their role in everyday life have been recognised. Metaphor has henceforth ceased to be a means only of poetic imagination and rhetorical embellishment. It began to be seen also as a form of human thinking, a tool of cognition. Metaphor began to be seen in areas of life where it had hitherto been absent. These areas included law. However, the enthusiasm of authors who see the great role of metaphorical imagery in law is not justified. An analysis of the examples of metaphors in legal texts given in scientific studies indicates too much freedom in qualifying certain expressions as metaphors and seeing their role or usefulness where there is none – that is, also in legal texts and in the interpretation of law. Metaphors are mistaken for phraseological compounds and for previously metaphorical expressions that have permanently lost this character as a result of conventionalization or lexicalisation. The potential effect of adopting a cognitivist perspective has previously been otherwise achieved in the legal sciences at the expected level. The results indicated as possible with the tools of cognitive science are nothing new, and the possibility of achieving them is either debatable or impossible. The conceptual metaphor, on the other hand, can play an important role when it comes to the justification of judicial or administrative decisions, the content of law textbooks, statements of doctrinal representatives with regard to the law Using the language of cognitive science, the radial structures of legal and ethical concepts can more promisingly be made the subject of research, which can enable the coexistence of humans and artificial intelligence. The research material was mainly investigated using the method of linguistic analysis.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.