On the Epistemological Foundations and Issues of the Modern Legal Understanding Doctrine

Abstract

This article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis and understanding of existing epistemological approaches to the study of legal understanding. The paper reveals modern doctrinal concepts in relation to the definition of the category “legal understanding”, its ontological, axiological and problematic aspects, provides and critically analyzes some methodological approaches to the organization of the content of the legal understanding doctrine. In particular, the author focuses on the theoretical characteristics of such ontological categories of legal understanding as the essence and definition of the concept of law, considered as its internal content and complete (idealized) form, their axiological problem and epistemological positioning in the structure of modern legal knowledge. From the standpoint of general scientific methods and requirements, the idea of the inadmissibility of ignoring the objective system- and structure-forming properties of these ontological categories, their universal (global) significance and the need to exclude their multivariance (multiplicity) is substantiated.It is concluded that the theory of legal understanding represents the fundamental direction of legal science for developing reliable, objective, and substantiated knowledge about the essence and understanding of law. The theory of legal understanding should be determined by specific (strict) requirements of scientific rationality, such as finding objective laws of change and development of law, establishing its essence, creating an idealized theoretical construct (concept definition) of law, and development of scientific foresight and forecasting of the future of law, etc.