Paweł Banaś

In this paper, we argue that proper names have deferred uses. Following Geoffrey Nunberg, we describe the deferred reference mechanism by which a linguistic expression refers to something in the world by exploiting a contextually salient relation between an index and the referent in question. Nunberg offered a thorough analysis of deferred uses of indexicals but claimed that proper names do not permit such uses. We, however, offer a number of examples of uses of proper names which pass grammatical tests for deferred usage, as put forward by Nunberg.

According to Hart, “the assertion that a legal system exists is […] a Janus-faced statement looking both towards obedience by ordinary citizens and to the acceptance by officials of secondary rules as critical common standards of official behaviour”. This can be interpreted as a claim regarding the dual metaphysical dependency of legal systems. According to the Hartian Janus-face metaphor, the metaphysical positions of officials and ordinary citizens are asymmetrical. Burazin’s Artifact Theory of Law provides an ontological interpretation of this asymmetry that remains consistent with Hart’s own idea: instantiations of legal systems are ultimately and directly constituted by the content of officials’ collective propositional attitudes. The metaphysical dependency of legal systems on the propositional attitudes of ordinary citizens is indirect and limited in scope. I wish to argue that the Janus-face metaphor allows, theoretically speaking, for an alternative interpretation. Namely, it might be the case that it is ordinary citizens rather than officials who ultimately constitute legal systems. The core thesis of this alternative view would be that even instantiations of complex legal systems are ultimately dependent for their existence on the content of the propositional attitudes of a relevant community of citizens. Or, to put it in different terms, it is the legal consciousness of the folk that grounds the instantiation of a legal system.

The paper critically examines the conception of majoritarian democracy. In the second part of the text, the author introduces the definition of majoritarian democracy based on the Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of minimal democracy. The thesis of the paper is that electing the government by universal suffrage is neither necessary nor sufficient as a condition for a democratic regime. The concept of democracy is broader, including the catalogue of democratic values connected with the concept of democratic citizenship, special circumstances of political action and the limitation of government powers.