Abstract
Judges typically claim that rules contained in legal texts are interpreted in accordance with their ordinary meaning. It follows that the constituent question of what makes some meaning the ordinary one and the evidential question of how the determinants of ordinary meaning are identified and conceptualized are of crucial importance to the interpretation of legal texts. While a comprehensive analysis of these questions is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is possible as well as important to outline how such questions must necessarily be approached. Certainly, there are a variety of ways in which courts habitually go beyond or reject the linguistic meaning of the relevant text. Normatively based desires to, for example, ensure fair notice or avoid constitutional questions may cause a court to give a text a legal meaning that does not correspond with its linguistic meaning. The ordinary meaning principle, though, is necessarily concerned with the linguistic meaning of the text and not normative matters. As such, certain views about meaning and interpretation can be rejected as being incorrect. In particular, certain claims made by actual intentionalists are fundamentally inconsistent with how the ordinary meaning doctrine must be conceptualized. In short, the intentionalist position that a text means what its author intended it to mean, as well as the associated claims about the nature of natural language that often accompany this assertion, must be rejected. Instead, the ordinary meaning doctrine must be explicated on the basis of systematicities and conventions of language.
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Notes
- 1.
Taniguchi v. Kan Pacific Saipan Ltd., 132 S.Ct. 1997, 2003 (2012).
- 2.
Of course, not all written language involves a context of interpretation that is far removed from the context of utterance. For example, a note passed in class would involve a context of interpretation that is very similar to the context of utterance.
- 3.
If the speaker uses ‘dried’, as in (1b), the speaker will have said nothing about how the trying came about, though the use of a tea towel, and ‘wiping’ is one possibility.
- 4.
Vagueness could still exist, however, because it is tied more to the nature of language and less to authorial intent. For example, a term is vague if it presents borderline difficulties (Sorensen 1989). Wasow et al. (2005, p. 2) note that “[m]ost expressions in natural languages are vague—that is, the denotations of most expressions are fuzzy around the edges”. When, for example, is something green instead of brown or blue? The answer to the question, whatever it may be, is orthogonal to any concept of ambiguity.
- 5.
“The principle of compositionality states that the meaning of a complex linguistic expression is built up from the meanings of its composite parts in a rule-governed fashion” (Murphy and Koskela 2010, p. 36).
- 6.
For a somewhat similar response to this claim and others by Alexander and Prakash see Sinnott-Armstrong (2005).
- 7.
A distinction between categorical and semantic intentions is irrelevant to most legal texts because there is no doubt as to their proper categorization as legal texts.
- 8.
Such a mistake is not limited to verbal communication. Trivedi (2001) points to an example where a sculptor intended a sculpture to be curvaceous but it instead looks angular.
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The author would like to thank the organizers of Rules § 2013 and Jagiellonian University for hosting a terrific conference and the participants for their comments on my paper.
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Slocum, B. (2015). The Ordinary Meaning of Rules. In: Araszkiewicz, M., Banaś, P., Gizbert-Studnicki, T., Płeszka, K. (eds) Problems of Normativity, Rules and Rule-Following. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 111. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09375-8_22
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