Deontic Noema. A Contribution to a Theoretical Analysis of Normative Experience

Many theories of law tend to consider legal norms mainly as, or in strict connection to, linguistic entities, such as normative sentences, normative propositions or normative speech acts. The focus of these kinds of theories is generally laid on norm-creating acts: they almost completely disregard the other side of normative phenomena, that of normative experience. While this approach may be legitimate in a dogmatic perspective, it appears inadequate to give a complete account of what law is in its entirety as a human and social phenomenon, and it falls short of explaining many aspects of the actual operating of norms on behaviour, as well as the emergence of customary legal norms independently of any norm-creating speech act. Starting from the consideration that normative and legal phenomena generally intersect different orders of phenomena, such as those of linguistic, social, logical, psychological, practical, behavioural and ethical phenomena, I will first distinguish, in an ontological perspective, seven different kinds of entities that in different contexts can be called “norms”: deontic sentences, deontic utterances, deontic propositions, deontic states-of-affairs, deontic behaviours, deontic objects, and deontic noemata. I will then focus on the phenomenological notion of a deontic noema – of a norm as an intentional object – and I will suggest that this notion can be fruitful for the analysis of normative experience – and of the experience of law in particular – by briefly focusing on the analysis of normative experience in Leon Petrażycki. However, since a subject can act in consideration of a norm without complying, or feeling obliged to comply, with that norm (when stealthily stealing something, for instance, as Max Weber suggests), I will argue that a deontic noema is not necessarily the correlate of a genuine deontic noesis – of a truly normative experience: it can also be the correlate of a non-deontic noesis, of a mere knowledge of the norm, as Ota Weinberger seems to suggest.