Gayvoronskaya, A. A. Social Images of Justice (Psychosemantic Approach)

Abstract: Contemporary social and psychological researchers believe justice to be one of the most important topics of human life ontology. The author of the present research have tried to prove the following hypotheses: 1) justice is a socially determined phenomenon; 2) ‘equality of all’ is one of the key elements in the social image of justice; 3) the social image of extremism is structured around the elements that have moral and legal connotations. Gayvoronskaya has decided to apply the psychosemantic approach to studying social images of justice because this approach allows to discover the hidden (unconscious) processes driving human behavior. Psychosemantic methods, in particular, microsemantic and prototypical analysis, allow to solve the following problems: to define the connection (relationship) between the studied definition of justice and other definitions or systems of definitions; to define and analyze the most significant connections and, finally, to reconstruct the model of justice. Conclusions: 1. Justice is a socially determined phenomenon that is based on moral principles regulated by the law. 2. The structure of social images of justice is defined by the peculiarities and specific features of the phenomenon. In particular, there is a steady core (execution of laws, honesty and equal rights) which is organized around the leading value – ‘equality of all’. 3. Categorization levels which have been defined in the course of interpretation and analysis bear a relationship to significant topics of images and create a probability model of this phenomenon, i.e. justice is understood as ‘equality for all’ and performance of moral actions, as a punishment/reward or denial of justice at all.

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