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Legal Concepts as Social Representations

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Abstract

The nature of concepts is a subject of study of various disciplines, from philosophy to cognitive sciences, leading to fragmented understandings and conceptual dissociations. Legal concepts have been studied in an interdisciplinary manner across all these disciplines, suffering from similar fragmentation. Recently, the interdisciplinary crossroads between law and cognitive sciences have brought forward the notion of legal concepts as mental representations. However, this approach largely overlooks the systemic, historical, and societal elements essential to comprehending legal concepts. The aim of this paper is to advocate for the Social Representations Theory as a useful framework that bridges cognitive and socio-cultural dimensions of meaning and can provide a holistic approach to understanding legal concepts. This paper unfolds in three sections. The first section contextualizes the social representations approach within the law and language framework, emphasizing the societal influences on thought and meaning. The second section explains the notion of social representations, building upon Serge Moscovici’s definitions and Ivana Marková’s arguments for the necessity of this approach to accommodate the social dimension of meaning. The third and last section underscores the claim that legal concepts are, in essence, social representations, advocating for the usefulness of this approach in legal scholarship, both paradigmatically and methodologically, consequently arguing for an inclusion for a stronger focus on the social dimension of legal meaning.

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Notes

  1. Compare Marková [38, p. 1] in the context of researchers’ presuppositions influencing their research.

  2. Literature sometimes speaks of ‘representing an object’ [64, p. 96], sometimes equalling the object to its representation (see further discussion in this text. See also [64, p. 114; 65, p. 169; 74, p. 21].

  3. The notion of common sense may seem to create a strong link between the social representations approach and folk psychology. Folk psychology is used to denote the theories humans use to predict behaviour of others within an everyday way of understanding and rationalizing [72] or ‘a set of beliefs and practices about psychological issues in a particular culture’ [73]. While both social representations and folk psychology are cognitive frameworks used by individuals to navigate social world, they refer to fundamentally distinct theories: while social representations focus on the social meaning, folk psychology is concerned individual-level cognitive processes.

  4. It is not the purpose of this paper to tackle these further, suffice to say that the core/periphery thinking goes across linguistic, philosophical and cognitive studies. See for example [111,112,113].

  5. Calling the core as normative implies that core elements of social representations make it what it is and what it does within a given social group. To be understood, one needs to be able to reach for the core elements. The communicative processes of social representation formation are social in nature, similarly as various other processes, such as norm formation in terms of traditions, or customary law. Shared knowledge has a strong normative and dynamic nature. Social majorities (or individuals and groups with a strong social capital) may push the change of meaning, i.e. social representations [114]. To fully tackle the relationship between social representation construction and norm formation in terms of customary law is out the scope of this paper.

  6. It is out of scope of this paper to delve into the discussion on cognitive universalia.

  7. Hermeneutics brings the concept of preunderstanding into consideration at this point. To delve into this particular dimension would be outside the scope of this paper.

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Funding

The paper titled ‘Legal concepts as social representations’ has been created as a part of the project Využití metod sociální reprezentace v analýze právních konceptů [Method of social representation in the analysis of legal concepts], funded by Czech Science Foundation, Project Identification No GA20-10171S. The present paper is a substantial expansion on the basic theory published in Czech in Smejkalová et al. [57] Veřejný pořádek, důstojnost soudce a judikatura: Tři studie využití přístupu sociálních reprezentací v analýze právních konceptů (Brno: MUNIPress).

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    Terezie Smejkalová

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Smejkalová, T. Legal Concepts as Social Representations. Int J Semiot Law 37, 165–188 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10066-3

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