Mazurkiewicz Szymon, Legal Positivism Social Source Thesis and Metaphysical Grounding: Employing Metaphysical Grounding Based on Metaphysical Laws

The main thesis of contemporary legal positivism is the so-called social source thesis (SST). In Scott Shapiro’s formulation, it states that „legal facts are ultimately determined by social facts alone” . The SST refers to the relation of determination between legal facts and social facts. And whereas the relata of such relations – legal facts and social facts – have been widely discussed , the former mainly by legal philosophers, the latter by social ontologists, as well as legal philosophers in the legal context, the nature of the determination itself remains unclear. Of course, many philosophers of law have attempted to answer how social facts determine the content of law (i.e. legal facts), the most prominent of them being Herbert L.A. Hart and Scott Shapiro . However, it still remains unclear what the nature of this relation is. It may be a semantic or logical relation, like entailment. It is, however, much more plausible that the proper locus of this determination is in the...