Abstract
The present paper revisits and critically reconstructs one central tenet of interpretive legal skepticism, which I will label the “equivocity thesis”. According to this thesis, each statutory provision and judicial opinion can be constructed or interpreted in many ways, due to the plurality of the admissible hermeneutic techniques, methods, doctrines, and normative theories (“plurality thesis”) and their equal legal value (“parity thesis”): this leaves the interpreter with the discretional power to choose the legal solution he deems more correct (“normative unbindingness thesis”). The main purpose of this essay is an investigation of the scope of these theses and their philosophical and rhetorical/strategic relations with a more general semiotic skepticism, according to which the belief that communication requires both mutual understanding and shared linguistic meanings is unjustified. More precisely, I will first explore how interpretive legal skepticism can be grounded on Quine’s and Davidson’s indeterminist arguments (Sect. 3) and on deconstructionism (Sect. 4), and then test the possibility of employing a criticism of these conceptions against interpretive legal skepticism, based on Wittgensteinian arguments and developed along various lines by “practice-based” conceptions of meaning (Sect. 5).
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- 1.
For an interesting criticism of skepticism about practical reason in ethics, literature and law, see Nussbaum 1994.
- 2.
I take the distinction between internal and external skepticism from Dworkin 1986, 78–80.
- 3.
Note, however, that in many legal systems there is no a general obligation to give reasons for a judicial decision. For a survey, see Dyzenhaus and Taggart 2008.
- 4.
For example: the communicational and cognitive “relevance principle”; the homogeneous, “negative” meaning holism of an abstract langue internalized in the minds of language users; the existence of objective mind-independent thoughts that language users can grasp learning language (see the next sections) or of a transcendent canonical text that constraints interpretation. See infra, §§ 3–4.
- 5.
See Taylor 1992,14–15.
- 6.
- 7.
Fish 1988, 885.
- 8.
See Jori 1993, 2119–2121. Jori, however, rejects any kind of skeptical conclusion.
- 9.
What the skeptic must avoid is replacing intuitions about ordinary language with intuitions about legal language and treating the latter as empirical hypotheses: for this would give rise to a second-order skepticism about the grounds of first-order skeptical conclusions.
- 10.
See Hart 1994, 136–141.
- 11.
I choose this particular label to avoid using here the more general term “indeterminacy”, which covers different phenomena such as vagueness, linguistic ambiguity, contestability. The literature on legal indeterminacy is vast: see Yablon 1985; Kress 1989; D’Amato 1990; Drahos and Parker 1991; Rosenfeld 1992; Bix 1993; Kutz 1993; Coleman and Leiter 1993–1994; Fowler 1995; Perry 1995–1996; Lawson 1996; Tushnet 1996; Solum 1987, 1999; Endicott 2001.
- 12.
E.g., canons of construction such as the “plain meaning” rule (where the plain meaning is inferred from statutory definitions, case law, administrative regulations, legislative history), the “whole act” rule, the rule to avoid surplusage, the presumption of consistent usage and meaningful variation, the contextual “noscitur a sociis”, “eiusdem generis” and “expressio unius”.
- 13.
E.g., distinguishing, overruling, and the creation of legal fictions and presumptions to avoid applying the plain meaning rule (see Gottlieb 1968, 44).
- 14.
I hereby mention just some potentially conflicting doctrines: “caveat emptor” vs. “caveat venditor”; “castle doctrine” vs. “duty to retreat”; “quantum meruit” vs. “quantum valebat”; “spider in the web” vs. “lex loci”.
- 15.
E.g., textualism, originalism, instrumentalism, “moral reading” theory, “living tree” doctrine. Of course, each version of these “theories” of interpretation can be articulated in several ways.
- 16.
Just think about Hart’s preference for literal meaning (as limited by the common sense and reasonableness assumptions of laymen and lawyers), Lon Fuller’s insistence on functional interpretation, and Ronald Dworkin’s claims that statutory construction and the interpretation of precedent must respect historical consistency and coherence.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
I believe that, at least synchronically, negative easy interpretive decisions are very rarely relevant in legal practice, and even less so in judicial decision-making. Advocates and officials form a sort of barrier against the discussion in courtrooms of cases which would be easily dismissed (or sanctioned as lites temerariae).
- 20.
See Tushnet 1996, 345–349.
- 21.
- 22.
Jules Coleman and Brian Leiter (1993–1994, part I, §A) presented this point by distinguishing 1) the determinacy of reasons from the determinacy of causes and 2) the legal indeterminacy from the extra-legal determinacy. According to the authors, the fact that legal rules and principles are not sufficient to justify or to cause court’s decisions doesn’t mean that these decisions cannot be predicted by applying a scientific explanation of extra-legal causes. More about indeterminacy in Leiter 2007, 10–12.
- 23.
See Leiter 2007, especially chapters 1 and 5 and the Postscript to Part II.
- 24.
Leiter 2007, 41. Leiter explores the vantage points and shortcomings of the analogy between legal realism and the project of a naturalized jurisprudence at 40–46; 54–58.
- 25.
See Quine 1987.
- 26.
- 27.
See Quine 1987.
- 28.
Quine 1992, 27.
- 29.
The underdetermination thesis has been efficaciously criticized in Laudan 1990. Laudan distinguishes several versions of this thesis, showing that «neither logical compatibility with the evidence nor logical derivability of the evidence is sufficient to establish that a theory exhibiting such empirical compatibility and derivability is rationally acceptable» (276), that is, that the theory is empirically supported by or explains the evidence.
- 30.
Quine 1987, 10. The same point is made in Davidson 1991, 164.
- 31.
A behaviorist conception of legal interpretation and adjudication is developed by Underhill Moore and Gilbert Sussman (1931). The authors argue that once it has been discovered a regularity in the behavior of the officials belonging to a specific institution, “measured” the deviations from this regularity and determined at which point the officials intervene to correct the deviation, it is possible to predict which deviations will cause the reactions of the officials.
- 32.
See Davidson 1985.
- 33.
See Davidson 1986.
- 34.
See Davidson 1973.
- 35.
- 36.
See Davidson 1970, 186: «Quine is right, I think, in holding that an important degree of indeterminacy will remain after all the evidence is in; a number of significantly different theories of truth will fit the evidence equally well». Davidson, however, distances himself from Quine’s “proximal” theory of meaning, which led him to radical semiotic skepticism, in a later essay: see Davidson 1990. A clear limit of Davidson’s communicational skepticism is his assumption of a massive agreement in beliefs about the world between the interpreter and the interpreted subject.
- 37.
Davidson, however, does not undervalue the practical (as opposed to the theoretical) importance of other factors, such as time, opportunity, linguistic conditioning, intuition, luck, taste and sympathy (see Davidson 1985, 24–25).
- 38.
- 39.
See Ross 1958, 113.
- 40.
- 41.
See Ross 1958, 145.
- 42.
- 43.
Ross 1958, 153.
- 44.
Ross 1958, 153–154.
- 45.
See Davidson 1985, 25: «Knowledge of the conventions of language is […] a practical crutch to interpretation, a crutch we cannot in practice afford to do without – but a crutch which, under optimum conditions for communication, we can in the end throw away, and could in theory have done without from the start». See also Davidson 1994.
- 46.
Davidson 1985, 25.
- 47.
- 48.
Ross 1958, 153.
- 49.
Hart 1994, 89, 291.
- 50.
Derrida 1988a, 12.
- 51.
Derrida 1988a, 12. See also Derrida 2001, 365–366. Note the resemblance between Derrida’s thesis and what Davidson (1979, 13) calls “the autonomy of linguistic meaning”: «Once a feature of language has been given conventional expression, it can be used to serve many extra-linguistic ends; symbolic representation necessarily breaks any close tie with extra-linguistic purpose». An opposite conception about meaning and context is expressed by Frederick Schauer (1991, 55–57).
- 52.
De Saussure 1966, 121.
- 53.
Derrida 2001, 369–370.
- 54.
Derrida 2001, 365.
- 55.
Derrida 2001, 369.
- 56.
Derrida 2001, 369.
- 57.
- 58.
- 59.
- 60.
Derrida 1988a, 8.
- 61.
Derrida 1988b, 136.
- 62.
Derrida 1988b, 136.
- 63.
Derrida 1988b, 137.
- 64.
Derrida 1988b, 136.
- 65.
- 66.
Rosenfeld 1992, 159–160.
- 67.
- 68.
See Sperber and Wilson 1995, §§ 4.2. and 4.3.
- 69.
See Sperber and Wilson 1995, §§ 3.1. and 3.2.
- 70.
According to Sperber 2005 , the process of “calculating” the relevance of a linguistic stimulus is automatic and subconscious, and depends on a functional property of specific innate modules of our mind that react only to that kind of input.
- 71.
See Recanati 2004, 54.
- 72.
- 73.
- 74.
See Dworkin 1986, 243.
- 75.
- 76.
Fish 1980, 279.
- 77.
Fish 1983, 283.
- 78.
Brandom 2014, 23.
- 79.
See Chiassoni 2000.
- 80.
See Sunstein 1995.
- 81.
- 82.
See Brandom 1994 , 18–29.
- 83.
Quine’s view is a dispositional kind of regularism: it aims at replacing inexistent Platonic meanings with natural facts (stimuli).
- 84.
See also Taylor 1992, 137: «The rhetorical characteristic which is most distinctive of […] this determinist strategy is the “slippage” between the type of necessity governing the explanans and that said to be governing the explanandum». The first is logical (or, more generally, normative), while the second is natural.
- 85.
- 86.
See at least Wittgenstein 1958, §§ 201, 208, 238.
- 87.
- 88.
See Strawson 2008.
- 89.
- 90.
See Medina 2006, 35, where a criticism is developed against «the idea that agreement can fix meaning. […] This naïve semantic conventionalism or collectivism would make meaning utterly arbitrary and, therefore, it would be open to a social version of the Humpty Dumpty objection of semantic vacuity […]. On this view, there is no room for semantic constraints of any kind; linguistic communities […] are not bound by anything».
- 91.
See Medina 2006, 39–46.
- 92.
Brandom 2014, 33.
- 93.
Medina 2006, 120.
- 94.
Medina 2006, 118.
- 95.
Medina 2006, 121.
- 96.
Medina 2006, 118.
- 97.
Medina 2006, 122.
- 98.
See Arulanantham 1998.
- 99.
See Chiassoni 2000.
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Muffato, N. (2017). Doubting Legal Language: Interpretive Skepticism and Legal Practice. In: Poggi, F., Capone, A. (eds) Pragmatics and Law. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44601-1_6
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