Semantics, Pragmatics and Democracy

This article returns, once again, to the debate on the undecidability of fundamental rights and it focuses on the distinction, drawn by Luigi FERRAJOLI in Principia iuris, between semantics and pragmatics of legal language. After a critical statement of semantic conventionalism on which positivistic constitutionalism rests, it is argued that bridges between legal language and citizen's ordinary speech must be kept open to the public scrutiny. The aim of these observations is to claim that, at least on these matters, the field of positivistic constitutionalism is not as homogeneous as it appears in the characterization given by Luigi FERRAJOLI in his recent works.