The concept of legal fiction is an epistemological category

The paper attempts to define the concept of legal fiction and assesses the role of legal fictions in legal practice, especially insofar as they allow for legal change. The paper defines legal fiction as any suspension of one or more required operative facts leading to the imposition of an associated normative consequence, whether this “suspension” is imposed because of the absence of evidence of a previously required fact; or the presence of evidence to the contrary. Legal fiction is one of the positive fictitious phenomena in law, which the legislator needs to solve the tasks of regulating social relations. The author proposes the newest in legal science definition of legal fiction as an epistemological category. Epistemology answers questions related to how we can make our beliefs about this world knowledge. An epistemological category is a concept that offers a definition of knowledge to establish pragmatic (“useful”) legal truth, formulating the distinctions between knowledge, certainty, and probability. A category that formulates the relevance of the assertion of evidence in the process, the influence of social aspects on the human mind’s perception of certain knowledge, defining the distinction between classical (mathematical) probability and legal probability (conjunctive propositions), and treating the quality of evidence as a matter of degree (balance of probabilities). Legal fiction is an epistemological acceptance of a fact, which does not correspond to reality, existing (or not existing), established by the norms of civil procedural law and causing certain legal consequences. Legal fictions do not take a position on the probability of valid facts. Instead, they simply make the operative fact (for the time being) irrelevant or unnecessary for imposing the corresponding normative consequence.