Law and cognition. On some issues and developments

This paper explores the role played by the wide area of the “cognitive”, especially understood as “common sense”, within the legal experience in order to show some aspects of law as well as of the political-institutional sphere. The analysis of the complexsemantic area widely related to the “cognitive” highlights its multiple dimensions, with particular regard to the social knowledge, the concept of common sense, the presuppositional horizon, the notions of belief, the idea of trust and the psychological dimension. Moving from this methodological framework, the attention focuses on the “law in action”, that is to say on two levels underlying the conceptual circle composed by the cognitive horizon, the legal experience and the common sense: on the one hand the structure of the legal order and, on the other hand, the political-institutional dimension. In this way, the analysis allows to think about the possibility to rethink the concept of law in order to build up a multifactorial or integrated model of law encompassing the outcomes provided by other theoretical approaches.