Epilogue

Summary

Throughout this book, we have attempted to show some of the possibilities that logical analysis offers for the study of legal systems. To do so, we have presented an introduction to the basic aspects of deontic logic and contrasted the attitudes of optimism and skepticism about the possibility of accepting logical relationships among norms. In the first chapters, we briefly reviewed the connections between propositional logic, predicate calculus, alethic modal logic, and deontic logic, and then offered a schematic outline of the different systems of deontic logic that constitute the conceptual basis that has generated the most important technical developments in deontic logic. Unlike philosophers who regard norms as a special type of propositions, we have emphasized the pragmatic aspects that characterize directive discourse, and defended the idea that the most promising way to justify the existence of a logic of norms is on the basis of an abstract notion of logical consequence, which allows the development of a genuine logic of norms without making the controversial assumption that norms have truth-values.