WP 2: Legal-linguistic anthropocentrism

The second work package deals with the legal-linguistic anthropocentrism of private law. The language of private law incorporates epistemic, linguistic, and normative anthropocentrism.

Epistemic and linguistic anthropocentrism describes the perspective, that recognizes the fact, that humans remain bound by their cognitive prerequisites and language when creating law, while normative anthropocentrism describes a position according to which humans have a special (moral) status in private law – not animals, not nature, and not AI systems.

On the one hand, humans use private law concepts such as will, entitlement, duties, error, and deception to legally classify the situation of a promise, but at the same time they also describe their special moral position. They think only of themselves as having free will that can create bonds; they think of themselves as autonomous and therefore responsible; as subjects who act deliberately, deceitfully, and with a will to survive. Legal concepts therefore also express humans' self-perception.

The question is: Can and must private law break away from this linguistic anthropocentrism in order to provide appropriate answers to the involvement of AI systems, or is it necessary to defend the linguistic status quo?

New phenomena are often initially assigned to existing concepts, but in the philosophy of technology there is already talk of a “semantic interregnum.”

This work package examines, whether the retention or transfer of established conceptual categories undermines or obscures essential understandings of law and which resources of meaning need to be taken into account. Linguistic theories and linguistic research are used for clarification.