Abstract

This paper develops a novel hybrid theory of legal statements that reconciles their dual cognitive and practical nature, arguing that they express both beliefs and desire-like attitudes. Through systematic analysis, it demonstrates that the descriptive content of legal statements remains constant within a legal system regardless of conversational context, which is crucial for explaining patterns of disagreement, retraction norms, and attribution of responsibility for content. Furthermore, it argues that the desire-like states expressed by legal statements uniformly target a general property picked out by “it is the law that”, enabling valid legal arguments to maintain inference-licensing property generating rational pressure to accept their conclusions. Importantly, the paper identifies generalized conversational implicature as the pragmatic mechanism conveying these desire-like states, explaining their key features of determinacy, reinforceability, non-detachability, cancelability, and calculability. These findings support a an explanation of the regular connection between legal statements and motivation. Rather than positing a conceptually necessary relationship between legal statements and motivational states, it explains their characteristic connection through the general action-guiding purpose of legal discourse and the Cooperative Principle with its attendant maxims.