Abstract
In this paper I will tackle three issues. First, I aim to briefly outline the backbone of semantic minimalism, while focusing on the idea of ‘liberal truth conditions’ developed by Emma Borg in her book ‘Minimal Semantics’. Secondly, I will provide an account of the three principal views in legal interpretation: intentionalism, textualism and purposivism. All of them are based on a common denominator labelled by lawyers ‘literal meaning’. In the paper I suggest a novel way of viewing this common denominator as almost identical to the Borgian ‘liberal truth conditions’, at least at a conceptual level. In the third section I will focus on the conceptual similarities between the two ideas. I intend to depict that, although legal theorists do not admit it explicitly, they treat literal legal meaning as minimal propositional content that can be ascribed liberal truth conditions. There are two main objections to liberal truth conditions: their under-determinacy and unintuitive character. Both objections can be applied to ‘literal meaning’. However, the idea of liberal truth conditions gives an adequate account of what lawyers call literal meaning and is helpful in explaining the mechanism of understanding of provisions and reasons leading to the necessity of statutory interpretation.
Highlights
Defining the Key Notions1.1 The Semiotic TriadIn 1938, Charles Morris coined a triadic divide of semiotics into three intertwined areas: the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of a language
All the co-textual levels are appropriate for the minimalist. They all preserve the idea of liberal truth conditions, as they are an amalgam of syntactic and semantic factors without pragmatic elements
If there exists a common denominator of interpretive doctrines constituted by liberal truth conditions, how to account for the issue of pervasive disagreement in law? How to explain Ronald Dworkin’s observation that theoretical disagreement about the law is omnipresent? As Brian Leiter puts it: ‘The ‘‘theoretical disagreements’’ that interest Dworkin presuppose that statutes and judicial decisions are, ‘‘grounds of law,’’ but deny that this settles the question of what the criteria of legal validity really are: the key theoretical disagreements for Dworkin concern the meaning of the acknowledged sources of law such as statutes and constitutional texts’ [27]
Summary
In 1938, Charles Morris coined a triadic divide of semiotics into three intertwined areas: the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of a language. The standard example of a semantically interesting relationship is that between a name and its referent: a linguistic item such as ‘Felix’ has apparently something to do with Felix, a cat This relatively unproblematic example of a semantic feature and of the extra linguistic items it targets is, typically accompanied by a list of other less straightforward instances: predicates are semantically related to classes of individuals, sentences to truth-values, and, more generally, expressions of all sorts get paired with nonlinguistic entities of a peculiar type, their meanings [3]. The order of mention of the parts within the semiotic triad should be purely random This is because, it does not tell us anything about which aspect of the divide is being processed first by a concrete speaker. Before having a closer look at such definitional controversies, we need to define another crucial notion for the present considerations, that is context
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