General theoretical legal science is essentially a practical discipline. Therefore, there is no institutional dualism between applied and theoretical jurisprudence in universities, unlike in mathematics or physics. However, a look at the previous history of law shows that there was a period when legal theory was subjected to fundamental research. At that time, arguments from related disciplines, such as philosophy and social sciences, were enthusiastically accepted for the sake of theoretical development of legal methodology. Unfortunately, this golden age of theory is over. Today, especially at the level of the European Union, we can see the establishment of methodological standards that cannot be comprehended by classical interpretation. This is the result of social transformations, with the help of the courts and only partially through the activities of the legislator. Therefore, the fundamental criticism of political conservatism and economic liberalism is not justified. It is found that since jurisprudence is a practical discipline and legal practice develops its own internal dynamics, the role of the general theory of law is becoming increasingly valuable. Firstly, it can be argued that, given the obvious self-sufficiency of legal practice, law should no longer be considered as an appropriate object of theorization. Secondly, you can complicate the already intricate legal practice with more legal theories. Finally, you can follow the classical approach to theory; and thus focus on providing simple answers to fundamental questions of law. The reasoning that understanding is always application does not explain the concept of correct application. However, Gadamer's “axiom” gives us a hint as to how we should proceed in addressing the basic question of legal methodology. This question can be formulated as follows: that law is something that must be understood before it can be applied. It has been argued that we could make progress on this issue by using philosophical semantics. In particular, by using the idea of sentences as the smallest meaningful units of language, associated with the notion that norms either appear in the form of a sentence or can be expressed in this form. Thus, nothing prevents us from claiming that we understand a norm when we know the conditions under which it is true. On the basis of the “theory of truth,” we can develop a theory of the autonomous meaning of a norm, which was needed to address a fundamental issue of legal methodology: the correct application of the law. In addition, most of our beliefs and arguments must be true. The reason is simple: the more mistakes we make, the less we are able to identify the targets of those mistakes. We have good reason to believe that our view of the world and the law is largely true. Keywords: theory, law, practice, legal methodology, understanding, application of law, argument, hermeneutics, semantics.
Mykhailo Kelman (Sun,) studied this question.