Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

34Chapter 1posed to lighten the tasks of social integration for actors whosecapacities for reaching understanding are overtaxed. For nothingappears less probable to the enlightened sociologist than the claimthat the integrative achievements of modern law are nourishedsolely, or even in the first instance, by a normative consensus,whether already existing or achieved, and hence by the communicativesources of solidarity.With the functional imperatives of highly complex societies,another kind of facti city comes into play. Unlike the facticity oflawenforcement, this social facticity is no longer internally related tothe legitimacy claimed for the legal order. The normative selfunderstandingof law can be negated by social facts that intervenein the legal system from without. Here facticity and validity areexternally related, for both moments-the normative presuppositionsof established legal practices, on the one hand, and the socialconstraints that actually govern legal decisions, on the other-canbe described independently of one another. Before taking up thistheme in the next chapter, I will recapitulate the internal relationsbetween facticity and validity that constitute the infrastructure oflaw in modern societies. 261.3.2Following the linguistic turn taken by Frege and Peirce, the oppositionbetween idea and perceptible reality was overcome. As itcame down from the Platonist tradition, this opposition was initiallyconstrued in ontological terms; later it was cast in terms of thephilosophy of consciousness. Ideas are then considered to bedirectly embodied in language, so that the facticity of linguisticsigns and expressions as events in the world is internally linked withthe ideal moments of meaning and validity. The generality ofmeanings gains its ideal status only in the medium of signs andexpressions that stand out, according to grammatical rules, fromthe stream of sign-tokens and speech events (or written materials)as recognizable types. Furthermore, the difference between thetruth of a proposition and its being taken to be true is accountedfor by explicating truth as rational assertability under ideal conditions,and hence only in reference to the discursive redemption of