ABSTRACT
Legal reasoning is a subset of reasoning generally. It is a thinking process by which we make sense and understand, whether the objects of the thinking are things around us in the physical world or ideas about how people ought to act. The appearance of moral certainty is an asset to a trial lawyer who is constructing the logical chain that would lead to a favorable result. This chapter focuses on the conflation of knowledge and belief and offers an explanation why. Theory-making is at the heart of pure lawyering. In legal academia, theory has a different connotation. The overlap with legal theories in practice is that, in both instances, theory-making is the attempt to use organizing principles reductively to express coherent meaning about a set of events in the real world. Conceptual metaphor theory provides benefits in thinking about that intuitive leap to a possible legal theory. Central to metaphor theory is the concept of an "idealized cognitive model".
