Thomas-M. Seibert
Introduction
Robert Birmingham
Law as syntax
Ludger Hoffmann
Speaking in court. An attempt to describe distinguishing features of code
gunter presch
employment references: origin, change and function of encoded phrasing
Enclosure
Gert Zeising
Before the law. A parable
Discussion
Gernot Wersig
Notes on a communication orientated sign concept.
New guidelines for semiotic terminology
Klaus Oehler
Contradiction
Hans-Heinrich Lieb
What is a sign? Comments on an attempt to explain
christian stetter
report from another star
Holger van den Boom
Why women prefer mechano-dynamic signs to those which they represent
Gernot Wersig
Only communications problems?
Literary report
André Helbo
Semiotics in the Benelux countries
Introduction: "Code", "Institution"
and the Paradigm of law
Thomas-M. Seibert, University of Frankfurt
Summary. The article places the concrete examples of this issue in the context
of the hitherto abstract discussion about codes. It argues that semiotics
should not be understood only as a working back from iconic codes to digital
structures, and emphasizes the achievement of practical semiotics and analogous
model-building. The characteristic features of institutional codes appear to be
repetition, schematization, and reflexivity. Their paradigm is the process of
legal rulemaking.
Law as syntax
Robert Birmingham, University of West Hartford, Connecticut
Summary. There cannot be more cases, including possible cases, than
descriptions of them, because it is the ability of judges to tell cases apart
that permits them to be different. So it is tempting to try to identify parts
of cases, say, facts and results, with their linguistic counterparts: records
and judgments. A legal rule, then, being a sort of thing that gets a judge from
a record to a judgment, is, in the terminology of Carnap's "Logische Syntax der
Sprache", a transformation rule. An opinion in a case is a specification of a
transformation rule, and part of the syntax language, as opposed to the object
language. The approach helps to explain legal fictions; the most important
impediment to it is that the sense of "similar" in which records are
similar
for purposes of making up legal rules is not likely to be wholly syntactical.
Speaking in court. An attempt to describe
distinguishing features of code
Ludger Hoffmann, Westphalian Wilhelms-University Münster
Summary. The example of courts suggests a procedure for analyzing the use of
verbal signs in institutions. The pragmatics of institutions concerns initially
the "surface structure" of strategies, of act-patterns and utterance-types,
and
points to the systematic difference between institutional and noninstitutional
uses. It is argued that there are "deeper structures" which - in opposition
to
the official program - determine the real course of actions in institutional
contexts.
employment references: origin, change and function of
encoded phrasing
gunter presch, university of hamburg
Summary. The use of encoded statements in employee evaluation certificates
leads to ambiguity in the meaning of their language, and to its being given
specialized meaning. These results are to be explained as an expression of
social conflict. Contemporary principles governing the writing of these
certificates and the effects of these principles are described and criticized
("ideologiekritischer" approach). The study is complemented and deepened
by
explanation of these principles as consequences of historically determined and
problematic compromises among competing social forces
("sozialgeschichtlicher"
approach).
