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2 - In Search of the Nature of (International) Law – Methodological Postulates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2019

Miodrag A. Jovanović
Affiliation:
University of Belgrade
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Summary

The chapter takes on the dominant methodology of the metaphysically driven conceptual analysis. Socio-legal scholars rightly argue that this method is unable to strike the right balance between pre-analytical, empirical and analytical work. Conceptual analysts regularly employ the terminology of ‘borderline cases’ (e.g. international law), despite the fact that it is incompatible with one of the central premises of this method, namely, that all the instances satisfying necessary conditions are equally good examples of the category membership. Finally, insofar as the conceptual analysis has to rely on intuitive categorization judgments, it is limited by our ordinary representation of concepts. But, this method seems to be premised on psychological assumptions which are contrary to recent experimental findings in the field of cognitive psychology, according to which we take category (concept) to be “a representation of an array of features clustered around some sort of prototype.” Hence, the analytical work in this book is undertaken within the prototype theory of concepts.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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