Archiwum
Filozofii Prawa
i Filozofii Społecznej

Journal of the Polish Section of IVR (ISSN:2082-3304)

IVR

In the Margins of the Concept of the Language of Legal Norms

Prof. dr hab. Andrzej Malinowski

University of Warsaw

English abstract: The article presents an attempt at an alternative approach to the scholarly interpretation model, in which statements expressed in the language of norms have been replaced by statements in the language of lawyers. In the proposed approach, the result of the interpretation of a legal text is a set of sentences of the lawyers’ language stating that a specific general legal norm applies at the moment of interpretation due to the validity of the relevant fragment of the legal text. The whole (complete) set of statements in the lawyers’ language whereby legal norms are held to be valid is treated by lawyers as a description of the legal system. It is stated that, considering the law as a system, neither case law nor scholarship in practice refers to the language of norms, but to the results of interpretations described in the lawyers’ language. However, the paradigm of scholarly interpretation using the concept of the language of norms has its undoubted cognitive value and is useful for didactic purposes.

Keywords: scholarly interpretation, legal system, legal language, lawyers’ language, language of norms

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 54-64.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.54

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Against a local theory of meaning for the legal language – some general remarks

Mgr Paweł Banaś

Jagiellonian University


English abstract: Within philosophy of law as well as philosophy of language one can find a view suggesting that legal and natural languages have two different theories of meaning: meaning externalism and intentionalism accordingly. This view can be interpreted as a metaphysical one, ie. that there are two different kinds of facts that determine that expressions of legal and natural languages mean whatever they mean. For natural language these facts would be intentions of the speaker. Such a view of natural language seem intuitive as the aim of a communication is usually trying to grasp whatever a speaker has in mind. Such a view proves, however, problematic for the legal language. Meaning exteralism for legal language, on the other hand, allows for law to be objective. But it must show how its expressions are meaningful (as content is usually closely related to intentionality). As a result, a satisfactory theory of facts constituting linguistic meaning might require a pressuposition that meaning (also legal or natural) is a social artifact: its content is constituted by some kind of collective intentionality of language users. This solves a numer of problems with both intentionalism and meaning externalism – but also creates new ones that might require further studies.

Keywords: intentionalism, meaning externalism, legal language, natural language, theory of meaning

Language: Polish

Received: 10.10.2016
Accepted: 12.11.2016

Published: Number 1(14)/2017, pp. 7-16.

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Number of downloads: 41