The Artifactualist Conception of Conduct Norms: A reply to Arriagada, Rodríguez and Godinho

Abstract

This reply offers an answer to the comments made by Arriagada, Rodríguez and Godinho, focused on the following problems: the understanding of ontological questions that supports the categorization of legal norms as institutional abstract artifacts; the relation that holds between norms and language with regard to the critical reconstruction of the expressive and the hyletic conception and the clarification of how semantics and pragmatics are interconnected; the intelligibility of both the postulation of abstract cultural artifacts, understood as entities that depend on intentional attitudes, and the categorization of legal norms as entities of that kind; and the compatibility of the ontological characterization of penally reinforced conduct norms as institutional artifacts with their functional characterization as authoritative external reasons for action, in reference to the implications that this double characterization has for the theory of criminal law systems.