Legal consciousness of the individual as a psychosemantic construct

The aim of the study was to theoretically substantiate the internal architecture and hierarchy of meanings that determine the logic of the perception of normative prescriptions and the choice of algorithms of human activity in the socio-regulatory space. The methodology was based on methods of conceptual-analytical elaboration, structural-logical modelling, case-study and applied analytical synthesis. It was established that within a psychosemantic perspective, legal consciousness is considered as a sphere of meaning-making in which legal phenomena acquire individual interpretations. The object of analysis shifts from formal awareness to the structure of subjective experience, in which “law” functions as a meaning category. Methodologically, it is essential to distinguish “meaning” as stable semantic content and “sense” as personalised evaluative-semantic modality. It was found that the psychosemantic framework unites the categorical organisation of meanings (semantic core), the evaluative-semantic modality and scenario forms of interaction into an integrated model. Legal consciousness appears as a structured semantic space in which the axes of interpretation provide the grounds for reconstructing individual meaning profiles. Contextual differences should be interpreted not as a “different level” of legal consciousness, but as variability of meaning configurations that determine the choice of strategies. Modality acts not as a “background” but as a structural mechanism of meaning-making, where key categories function as axial elements of the semantic core. Illustrative empirical plots (China, the United States of America, the Netherlands) confirm that the choice of scenarios of interaction with law depends on subjective trust and the meaningful evaluation of the situation. In Ukraine, the war brings the categories of justice and responsibility to the centre of the semantic core, stimulating scenarios of compensation and documentation of harm. It is appropriate to develop individual agency and algorithms of rights protection through the reconstruction of meaning oppositions and work with the evaluative-semantic modality of legal experience. The practical significance lies in the possibility of using the results by psychologists in psychological diagnostics and educational-preventive work to develop individual agency and to form effective strategies for the protection of rights