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NEGOTIATING THE MEANING OF “LAW”: THE METALINGUISTIC DIMENSION OF THE DISPUTE OVER LEGAL POSITIVISM
Legal Theory Pub Date : 2017-06-27 , DOI: 10.1017/s1352325216000070
David Plunkett

One of the central debates in legal philosophy is the debate over legal positivism. Roughly, positivists say that law is ultimately grounded in social facts alone, whereas antipositivists say it is ultimately grounded in both social facts and moral facts. In this paper, I argue that philosophers involved in the dispute over legal positivism sometimes employ distinct concepts when they use the term “law” and pick out different things in the world using these concepts. Because of this, what positivists say might well then be true of one thing (e.g., law1) but false of another (e.g., law2). Accepting this thesis does not mean that the philosophers engaged in this dispute are “talking past each other” or engaged in a “merely verbal dispute” that lacks substance. I argue that participants in this dispute are sometimes arguing about what they should mean by the word “law” in the context at hand. This involves putting forward competing proposals about which concept the word “law” should be used to express. This is an issue in what I call “conceptual ethics.” This argument in conceptual ethics can be well worth having, given the connotations that the term “law” plays in many contexts, ranging from legal argument to political philosophy to social-scientific inquiry. Sometimes, I claim, philosophers (and ordinary speakers) engage in such argument tacitly by competing “metalinguistic” usages of the term “law”—usages of the term that express a view (in this case, a normative view) about the meaning of the word itself. In such cases, speakers on different sides of the positivism debate might in fact both speak truly, in terms of the literal (semantic) content of what they both say. Nonetheless, they may disagree in virtue of views in conceptual ethics about “law” that they express through the nonliteral content of what they say. These views in conceptual ethics often reflect further disagreements about issues that are not ultimately about words or concepts. These include foundational ones in ethics and politics about how we should live and what kind of institutions should govern our lives. My metalinguistic account of the dispute over legal positivism better equips us to identify what such issues are and to engage them more fruitfully.

中文翻译:

协商“法律”的含义:法律实证主义争议的元语言维度

法律哲学的核心争论之一是关于法律实证主义的争论。粗略地说,实证主义者说法律最终仅基于社会事实,而反实证主义者则说它最终基于社会事实和道德事实。在本文中,我认为参与法律实证主义争论的哲学家在使用“法律”一词时有时会使用不同的概念,并使用这些概念来挑选世界上的不同事物。正因为如此,实证主义者所说的很可能对一件事是正确的(例如,法律1) 但对另一个错误(例如,法律2)。接受这个论点并不意味着参与这场争论的哲学家是在“互相交谈”或参与缺乏实质内容的“仅仅是口头争论”。我认为,这场争论的参与者有时会争论他们在手头的上下文中应该用“法律”这个词是什么意思。这涉及就应该使用“法律”一词来表达哪个概念提出相互竞争的建议。这是我所说的“概念伦理”中的一个问题。考虑到“法律”一词在许多情况下所发挥的含义,从法律论证到政治哲学再到社会科学调查,这种概念伦理学的论点非常值得一试。有时,我声称,哲学家(和普通的演讲者)通过对“法律”一词的竞争“元语言”用法——表达关于词本身含义的观点(在这种情况下,是规范观点)的术语的用法,默契地参与这样的论点。在这种情况下,实证主义辩论不同方面的发言者实际上可能都在说真话,就他们所说的话的字面(语义)内容而言。尽管如此,由于他们通过他们所说的话的非文字内容表达的关于“法律”的概念伦理学观点,他们可能不同意。概念伦理学中的这些观点往往反映了对最终并非关于词语或概念的问题的进一步分歧。其中包括伦理和政治中关于我们应该如何生活以及什么样的机构应该管理我们的生活的基础性问题。
更新日期:2017-06-27
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