Eksperyment myślowy jako metoda rozumowania prawniczego

• Authors: Tondera Mateusz

Title variants

EN

Thought Experiment as a Method of Legal Reasoning

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The purpose of the article is to spell out the role thought experiments play in law, especially in its interpretation and application. A thought experiment understood, following Ernst Mach, Roy Sorensen, and Bartosz Brożek, as a way to confront a theory or a hypothesis with “intuitive knowledge” or, more widely “background knowledge” through a mental simulation of the imagined situation, is a way of reasoning applied not only in physics or philosophy, but used commonly in everyday reasonings, especially that of a normative nature. In law, thought experiments enable – through the reorganization of pre-existing knowledge and intuition – the realization of the possible consequences of a given normative or interpretative decision. This holds true especially when it comes to consequences that go beyond the scope of a given case. The article presents two extensive examples from the Polish judicial practice, where the basis for the decisions can be found in the results of prior thought experiments.

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Jagielloński. Fundacja Utriusque Iuris
• Journal: Forum Prawnicze
• Year: 2017
• Issue: 2 (40)
• Pages: 45–63

Contributors

author

Tondera Mateusz