Meaningful Connection between the Concept “Law” and Interpretations of the Concepts “Due” and “Norm” in Various Models of Deontic Logic

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the concept "law" as a key element of the concept sphere of law in order to explain the mental obstacles on the way to the liberalization of the Russian political and legal system due to cognitive stereotypes and values of national consciousness, as well as the dominant directions of legal genesis. It is shown that as a regulatory concept "law" performs the organizational function of the formation of moral values as the basis of legal norms. According to comparative studies the prototypical image of the law in Russian linguistic culture is associated with the restriction of freedom, while in English culture, on the contrary, the law is perceived as the guarantor of freedom. It seems that the historical and philological explanation of this difference, associated with the study of the genesis of the lexeme "law", as well as the historical and legal explanation appealing to the religious and moral values of the respective cultures do not take into account the specifics of legal concepts, which are largely logically constructed, and therefore should be supplemented by a logical analysis of the concept "law". The notional side of the concept "law" was formed in the Russian linguistic culture in the course of social understanding of the existing rules and regulations in practice and their subsequent conceptual consolidation in codified norms. Since the codification in Russian law was carried out on the basis of external sources, the explanation of the specifics of understanding the concept of "law" in Russian culture requires an appeal to its subject-the possibility of deontic qualification of the subject mattered from the point of view of the law and the possibility of imposing sanctions fixed by legislative norm. In this regard, it is shown that in Russian and English-speaking cultures legal norms develop within the framework of different models of deontic logic, differing from each other by meaningful interpretations of due. Mental differences in the interpretation of the concept of "law" in Russia and the West are stipulated by the fact that in Russian legal culture due is understood as an ideal and is described by the formula "must be", and the norm has an impersonal formulation. In deontic logic this corresponds to the standard semantics of norms. On the contrary, in Western culture positive law is based on the idea of freedom of self-determination of individuals and tends to another model-generalized semantics of norms for deontic modality, where due characterizes human action and stands for "must be done", and the formulation of the norm takes into account the purpose, means and conditions of action. It is concluded that the culture-based model of deontic modality and its semantics of the possible world determine the understanding of the concept "law" in the concept sphere of law of a particular culture.