Pragmatic Inferences and Moral Factors in Treaty Interpretation—Applying Experimental Linguistics to International Law
Benedikt Harald Pirker, Izabela Skoczeń · German Law Journal · 2022
Abstract The article argues, based on results from massive online survey experiments, that, just as the utterances from ordinary conversation, legal rules can convey a surplus meaning, which is more than just the amalgam of the meanings of the words which are employed in the legal rule’s formulation. More precisely, the experiments check whether a typology of the types of this surplus meaning—pragmatic typology—describes adequately the psychological processing of, not only everyday speech, but also legal rules. In two experiments—total N = 733—we find that in morally neutral cases the pragmatic typology adequately describes the psychological processes involved in the interpretation of a legal rule. However, we also find that in morally valenced cases, it is rather the moral inferences carried by participants that shape the pragmatic inferences than the other way around.