Semiotic Paradigm of Legal Knowledge: Results and Perspectives of Scientific Search

Abstract

The article investigates the actual state of author’s semiotic researches of legal reality and outlines semiotic-legal discourse perspectives. In the article the directions of improving the legislative, law enforcement and law-education process on the basis of the use of intellectual systems and technologies in the field of law are defined with help of using of semiotics of law’s methodology. The author notes that there are three main aspects of semiotics of law – communicative, structural and social. In the structure of semiotics of law (as well as general semiotics) we can also distinguish: 1) the syntactic law, that explores the relationship between legal signs (legal syntax); 2) the semantics of law, that investigates the relationship between the signs and legal phenomena they denote (legal semantics); 3) the pragmatics of law, that explores the relation of the person-subject to the legal signs that it uses (legal pragmatics). Relying on the tradition of allocation of levels in the structure of the legal reality (S. Maksimov and other scientists), the author examines the semiotics of law through the prism of such a distinction. The article defines the main directions of theoretical and methodological conceptualization of semiotics of law. Each of them is devoted to the sign analysis of various forms of existence of law (in their deployment from abstract forms of essence to specific forms of existence): 1) semiotics of the idea of law (legal principles) – the study of a sign organization on the level of legal principles, ideas and ideals as the expression of natural law the primary point reflected in the legal consciousness; 2) semiotics of the law (norms or rules   of law) – an analysis of the relationships and regularities of the functioning of the signs, which have a formal-normative expression in the text of the law; 3) semiotics of legal life (legal relations) – the study of the specific character forms of legal life in the process of social interaction. The article defines the basic functions of semiotics of law: 1) world-viewing; 2) cognitive (informational); 3) educational; 4) methodological; 5) symbolically reflective; 6) praxeological (practically-transformative); 7) prognostic. The author notes that the interdisciplinary connections of semiotics of law are a system of mutual relations of semiotics of law with different philosophical and legal disciplines, which reflect its relation with these sciences and allow to more clearly define the place of semiotics of law in the system of socio-humanitarian knowledge. As a «branch» philosophical and legal discipline and methodological paradigm of philosophical and legal discourse, the semiotics of law interacts with other philosophical and legal disciplines – philosophical and legal ontology, epistemology, axiology, anthropology, praxeology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy, the philosophy of culture, the philosophy of politics, the philosophy of art, the philosophy of morality, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of language, etc. Each law science interacts with the semiotics of law. The semiotics of law also contacts with separate sciences whose objects are in one way or another connected with the world of legal phenomena and with other sign systems – in particular, history, sociology, political science, psychology, neurophysiology, cultural studies, art studies, social and cultural anthropology, geography, ethnography, genealogy, heraldry, religious studies, economic theory, mathematics, computer science, cybernetics, computer engineering, theory of algorithms, coding theory, cryptography, knowledge engineering, databases, expert systems, ling journalism, neuroscience, biosemiotics, semiotics of culture, semiotics of art, semiotics of politics and many others. The importance of the semiotic approach for solving certain actual problems of jurisprudence at the present stage of its development is described.