Ross as a Logical Empiricist

Ross often talked about legal philosophy rather than legal theory. This concept should not be taken verbatim. In this regard, Ross' idea is similar to the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, who emphasised that, for him, it was not important to practise philoso­phy, but to analyse philosophically interesting problems.

To encapsulate, it is the language of the doctrinal study of law. In this as well he was a child of his age. As Ross himself mentions, logical empiricism, still very much dominant at the time of “On Law and Justice”, set as its programmatic state­ment the thesis: The task of philosophy is the logical analysis of the language of science. Therefore, “On Law and Justice” strives for an analysis of the scientific nature (status) of the legal propositions presented in the doctrinal study of law.

Alf Ross' realism is literally legal realism. Everything he writes about law is written through the doctrinal study of law. As we are about to see, this attitude is a source of both Alf Ross' strengths and weaknesses. Let us first take a look at a few starting points. Ross' main target since his early works was natural law. In his Kelsenian phase he might be best characterised as a legal positivist, whereas the thoughts of the later Ross are more related to philosophical positivism. Both of these attitudes meant a polemical attitude against natural law. Therefore, one possible way to read “On Law and Justice” is by choosing the author's negative orientation toward natural law as an interpretative horizon.

Ross' philosophical positivism can be identified in his conscious purpose to for­mulate an empiricist theory for a scientific doctrinal study of law.

According to logical empiricism, relevant scientific arguments are either (1) based on perceptions or can at least (2) be reduced to them. Ross continues with this statement:

It is a principle of modern empirical science that a proposition about reality... must imply that by following a certain mode of procedure, under certain conditions certain direct expe­riences will result... This mode of procedure is called the principle of verification (Ross 1958, chapter 9, at 39).

This means that the real content of an empirical proposition is composed of those actual consequences that the proposition either expresses directly or which can be logically derived from propositions expressing direct experiences. Only in this way does science fulfil the requirements for truth (sandhetskvalitet). If a propo­sition does not fulfil this requirement, it does not belong to science, even though it might be interesting, aesthetically pleasing or well suited to invoking feelings. Thus, only empirical propositions could belong to Ross' scientific world-view (Ross 1958, x and chapter 8).

This can be called the empiricism hypothesis. On the other hand, statements (log­ically) derived from empirical propositions (verifiable implications) also belong to science. Let us call this the logicality hypothesis. Scientific theories are complex combinations of these two elements. To encapsulate: They are empirical and logical, or, to put it in one word, logico-empirical.