In his book The Concept of Law, Hart advances an arresting idea: the internal point of view. The idea immediately captured the imagination of legal theorists and was envisaged as a step forward in understanding both the nature of law and its practices. There is, however, lack of clarity and ambiguity on understanding Hart’s important notion and its role in different key jurisprudential problems such as the normativity of law and the methodology of legal theory. This article reconstructs the intellectual roots of the internal point of view and argues that although the seeds of Hart’s idea can be found in Winch’s seminal book The Idea of a Social Science, there are striking differences between Hart’s and Winch’s notions of the internal point of view. Winch endeavors to explain the participant’s viewpoint in terms of what the participants are doing. On the other hand, Hart aims to provide an explanation of how the law enables judges and law-abiding citizens to determine what they ought to do. This difference has been often overlooked by legal scholars; however, it provides the key to understanding Hart’s connection between the internal viewpoint and the normativity of law, i.e., the idea that legal rules provide reasons for action and, in some circumstances, create and impose duties and obligations. The distinction also illuminates the demarcation in the methodology of legal theory between an explanation from a detached perspective, namely the second or third-person standpoint of the practical point of view and, on the other hand, either a theoretical or hermeneutical explanation of the participant’s point of view. I argue that the non-recognition of the practical/participant distinction has been pervasive in two ways. First, there has been an overemphasis on the distinction between the internal and the external point of view. Second, a more fundamental distinction between an ‘engaged’ and ‘detached’ viewpoint which is a predominant feature of the practical point of view has been under-researched

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Two methodological claims in Hart's The Concept of Law have produced perplexity: that it is a book on "analytic jurisprudence" 1 and that it may also be regarded as an essay in "descriptive sociology." 2 Are these two ideas reconcilable? We know that mere analysis of our legal concepts cannot tell us much about their properties, that is, about the empirical aspect of law. We have learned this from philosophical criticisms of conceptual analysis; yet Hart informs us that analytic jurisprudence can be reconciled with descriptive sociology. The answer to this puzzle lies in the notion of nonambitious conceptual analysis. The theorist analyzes concepts but accepts the limitations of conceptual analysis and therefore uses empirical knowledge and substantive arguments to explain, refine, or perhaps refute initial insights provided by intuitions. This is the conclusion that this paper arrives at as an argumentative strategy to defend Hart's legal theory from the criticisms of Stavropoulos and Dworkin. The latter argues that Hart's legal theory cannot explain theoretical disagreements in law because he relies on a shared criterial semantics. Stavropoulos aims to show that Hart's semantics is committed to ambitious conceptual analysis and relies on the usage of our words as a standard of correctness. Both attacks aim to show that the semantic sting stings Hart's legal theory. This essay refines both challenges and concludes that not even in the light of the most charitable interpretation of these criticisms is Hart's legal theory stung by the semantic sting. This study defends the view that Hart's methodological claims were modest and that he was aware of the limits of conceptual analysis as a philosophical method. He was, this study claims, far ahead of his time.