V nasledujúcich riadkoch sa pokúsim dokázať, že ak sudcovia preferujú formalistickú právnu argumentáciu, tak potom nie v dôsledku toho, akú majú teoretickú koncepciu práva, ale v dôsledku toho, v akých spoločensko-politických pomeroch pôsobia. Formalizmus v právnej argumentácii nie je pojem, ktorého zmysluplné použitie nutne predpokladá teóriu právneho pozitivizmu a ktorého opodstatnenie nutne predpokladá autoritu tvorcu práva. Ak sa formalizmus v nejakej právnej kultúre etabluje, tak potom
zrejme kvôli výsledkom, ktoré generuje; kvôli tomu, že chráni hodnoty, ktoré chcú chrániť aktuálni držitelia moci, či už pod nimi rozumieme politickú elitu, spoločenskú triedu, predstaviteľov kultúrnej väčšiny alebo ľud ako celok. To prirodzene limituje aj schopnosť formalizmu riešiť tzv. koordinačný problém. and In the following pages I will try to prove a thesis according to which, when judges prefer
formalistic legal argumentation, they do not do so because of their theoretical conception of law but
because of the political and social conditions in which they happen to serve their office. Formalism
in legal argumentation is not a concept which is meaningful only against the backdrop of legal
positivism and which is justified only by the authority of a lawmaker. When formalistic argumentation
becomes embedded with the respective legal culture it is apparently so because of the results
it generates; because it protects values which current power holders want to be protected, whether
we understand them as political elite, social class, representatives of cultural majority or the people
as a whole. This naturally limits the capacity of formalism to solve the coordination problem.
According to formalism a mathematician is not concerned with mysterious meta-physical entities but with mathematical symbols themselves. Mathematical entities, on this view, become mere sensible signs. However, the price that has to be paid for this move looks to be too high. Mathematics, which is nowadays considered to be the queen of the sciences, thus turns out to be a content-less game. That is why it seems too absurd to regard numbers and all mathematical entities as mere symbols. T e aim of our paper is to show the reasons that have led some philosophers and mathemati¬cians to accept the view that mathematical terms in a proper sense do not refer to anything and mathematical propositions do not have any real content. At the same time we want to explain how formalism helped to overcome the traditional concept of science.