One of the central issues in the philosophy of legal language is that many legal propositions, despite their declarative and apparently descriptive syntactic form, possess a normative and binding function. Sentences such as “Whoever destroys another’s property is liable for it” or “Contracts are binding” appear, at first sight, to report a state of affairs; yet within a legal context they generate rights, duties, liability, or enforceable legal consequences. Using an analytical-comparative method, this article seeks to explain the source of this normativity. Its main hypothesis is that the normativity of declarative propositions in legal language arises neither from their syntactic form nor merely from legal terminology, but from the type of iʿtibār—a practical and normative construction—expressed by the sentence in its context of use. By rereading ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s theory of iʿtibāriyyāt in dialogue with the speech act theories of Austin and Searle, the article distinguishes three functions: the constitutive function, the ascriptive function, and the delimiting function. The article concludes that the apparent transition from “is” to “ought” in legal language is not a logical inference from a descriptive proposition to a normative one, but rather a pragmatic and iʿtibārī event.
Rafiei Alavi, S. E. (2026). The Normativity of Declarative Propositions in Legal Language: A Functional Classification Based on the Theory of Iʿtibāriyyāt and Speech Act Theory. Journal of Philosophical Investigations, (), -. doi: 10.22034/jpiut.2026.73737.4649
MLA
Rafiei Alavi, S. E. . "The Normativity of Declarative Propositions in Legal Language: A Functional Classification Based on the Theory of Iʿtibāriyyāt and Speech Act Theory", Journal of Philosophical Investigations, , , 2026, -. doi: 10.22034/jpiut.2026.73737.4649
HARVARD
Rafiei Alavi, S. E. (2026). 'The Normativity of Declarative Propositions in Legal Language: A Functional Classification Based on the Theory of Iʿtibāriyyāt and Speech Act Theory', Journal of Philosophical Investigations, (), pp. -. doi: 10.22034/jpiut.2026.73737.4649
CHICAGO
S. E. Rafiei Alavi, "The Normativity of Declarative Propositions in Legal Language: A Functional Classification Based on the Theory of Iʿtibāriyyāt and Speech Act Theory," Journal of Philosophical Investigations, (2026): -, doi: 10.22034/jpiut.2026.73737.4649
VANCOUVER
Rafiei Alavi, S. E. The Normativity of Declarative Propositions in Legal Language: A Functional Classification Based on the Theory of Iʿtibāriyyāt and Speech Act Theory. Journal of Philosophical Investigations, 2026; (): -. doi: 10.22034/jpiut.2026.73737.4649
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