Õiguse piirist postmodernistlikus keeleparadigmas

Abstract

Radical changes in modern society have also brought about changes in the paradigm of language – how we see and explain the world. Paradigms are important in society and culture, including in research, because they help to paint a picture of all possible or known ways of thinking, and thereby to develop a logic that helps to address the same facts, including legal facts, within different paradigms, and to see their differences and commonalities. At the same time, a paradigm is not an unchanging linguistic-cultural framework, but a model of thought and language that depends on the key principles, interests, and knowledge of the time, and which helps to better understand and interpret major changes in light of the generally accepted ideologies and values of the time. The linguistic paradigms of the time determine the possible questions and answers in argumentation, including legal argumentation.
Kuhn then began referring to such thought structures as paradigms. By ‘paradigm’, Kuhn meant the set of values, principles, and beliefs adopted by a group of researchers. In his view, the linguistic paradigm is understood as linguistic-ideological structures of the world that help to better understand the linguistic relations between humans and the world in terms of the generally accepted principles and values of the time. The language paradigm is thus not a fixed linguistic-cultural framework, but a way of thinking that depends on the essential principles, values, and knowledge of the time, to better understand radical changes in the world.
Paradigms can therefore be found not only in the natural sciences, but also in the social sciences and humanities. In social sciences and humanities, language paradigms as linguistic-cultural frameworks differ from each other in what is called socio-cultural reality. Ultimately, they are ‘determined by social and political ideologies’.
Paradigms, as sets of linguistically closely related assumptions about the surrounding world, are important in research because they help to paint a picture of all possible or known paradigms and thereby to develop a logic that helps to address the same facts, including legal facts, within the boundaries of different paradigms and see their differences and commonalities. The paradigm that shapes the theoretical framework of a study is closely related to a set of four types of philosophical assumptions or presuppositions – ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological – about the world around us.
A language paradigm is not a fixed framework, but a model of thought and language that depends on the key principles, interests, and knowledge of the time, and which helps to better understand and interpret major changes in light of the generally accepted ideologies and values of the time. It also defines which problems cannot be raised and which answers are excluded. Let us take Bohr’s principle of complementarity as an example here. In one sense, it can be discussed, but in another, it cannot.
Bearing in mind the dynamics of society and the aim of trying to explain and understand it through linguistic paradigms, we can distinguish between the three major linguistic paradigms already mentioned: semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic. In ancient and medieval times, the dominant linguistic framework was the semantic language paradigm. The syntactic language paradigm began to emerge with the development of theoretical physics and mathematics in 19th century modernist culture and society, where the essentialist approach to the world became more important in research, for example, in the creation of formalised language models of the world. This linguistic phenomenon also spills over into other fields, such as technology.