Structuralist Semiotics vs. Formal Logic in the Reconstruction of Judicial Reasoning
Structuralist Semiotics vs. Formal Logic in the Reconstruction of Judicial Reasoning

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, the author put on test two simple sets of conceptual tools (one set from formal logic, the other set from structuralist semiotics) explaining the reasoning of judges in a practical case. Years have passed already since the use of logic has acquired a status of tradition in the attempts of reconstructing the judicial reasoning. All this time, however, the scope of the use of logic in the law has been controversial. But while many of us mock at the syllogistic explanation of the decision-making process, we usually fail to provide an alternative account that would not lead to the following counter-intuitive proposition: “Inreality, anything goes.” In the author’s opinion this proposition is counter-intuitive, for if we believed or felt indeed that normally judges take decisions arbitrarily (and only later search for their justification), would the majorities in our democratic societies not reject subjection to such a rule-of-judges? According to the author, they certainly would. Now, how do judges decide cases if, on the one hand, every chain of reasoning is clearly not accepted by the society, while at the same time judges may and often do – according to our senses – legitimately dissent from one another? From different strands of legal semiotics that have claimed, for some decades now, to have an answer to this issue, the author chooses to work with the structuralist semiotic model. He faces it with the formal logic model theoretically and practically in order to discuss the merits of the former in the field of studies on judicial reasoning. In the first part of this paper, he shows the structuralist semiotic critique of the traditional account and, in the second part, he proves its practical advantage.

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