Sobre la teoría de los conceptos jurídicos de Alf Ross. Explicitando sus presupuestos verificacionistas e inferencialistas

Abstract

On Alf Ross’ Theory of Legal Concepts. Making Explicit its Verificationist and Inferentialist Assumptions

This article explores the semantic behavior of legal terms in predicate function. It more specifically deals with the explanatory proposal presented by Alf Ross first in Tû-Tû and later in On Law and Justice. First, it argues that its explanation can be redirected to two diverse and jointly incompatible semantic theories. On one hand, an explicit version of the verificationist semantic approach of logical empiricism and, on the other, an implicit and abbreviated version of the inferentialist semantic theory. Second, it shows that the literature has mostly rejected the first of the theories as unsatisfactory, while considering the second one largely plausible to explain the semantic of these sort of terms. Third, it is argued that the notion of reference, according to Ross, does not play an important role in the explanation of the semantics of these linguistic expressions.