Institutional mimesis: An Experimental Study on the Grounding of Legal Concepts

Legal institutions, legal systems and the law in general are human artefacts. However, Is there a sense in which we can consider legal institutions to be natural, other than artefactual? Is there a connection between law and conceptions of nature? This problem has not attracted much interest in the legal-philosophical literature, but there is at least one exception: Hans Kelsen’s book Society and Nature, of 1943. Contemporary cognitive psychology, however, adds further elements to the picture. The literature on the so-called “embodied” and “grounded cognition” shows that the most basic experience of the physical world embedded in our perceptual and motor cognitive systems can be at the root of all kinds of abstract concepts, and hence—we could conclude—also of legal institutions. In this paper, we present an experiment conceived and carried out to test some conjectures connected with this general problem.