Seminar with Raquel Franco (Universidade de Lisboa)

Naturalizing Interpretation: A First Approach on “Hardware” and “Software” Determinants of Legal Interpretation

The seminar will be a hybrid meeting. It will be held in 110 on Bracka 12, Kraków and Teams on April 04, 2023 (Tuesday, 17:30 GMT+1). 

Abstract:

In matters such as legal interpretation, analytical legal theory (ALT) has long focused on the structure of thought rather than on the psychological process of thinking. In doing so, despite accepting that interpreting is a psychological process, linguistic and logical analysis was favored in lieu of sociological, psychological and behavioral enterprises. This is mainly because the latter—dubbed, at the best possible scenario, “soft core science”—contradicted, in his predictive aim, the paradigm of the “free-willed rational man” that ALT presupposed. But here is the twist: the model seems flawed. Pure rationality does not entirely explain the functioning of the human brain. Neuroscience and evolutionary psychology state the case that the human brain functions in such a way that it primarily replicates our genes over our interests or wills. It is perhaps time to conceive “naturalizing” legal interpretation by complementing the anthropologically spare model of ALT and attending to the both blades of the scissor in Simon’s metaphor: the invariants of both language and human interpreters. A theory of interpretation (lato sensu) will necessarily be incomplete if it does not address the conditions of the human interpreter and account for the difference between “hardware” and “software” conditions of the interpreter.

This research was funded by the Priority Research Area Heritage under the program Excellence Initiative – Research University at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow