What Inferentialism Tells Us About Vagueness in Law

Abstract

According to a view that founds wide support in philosophy of language and linguistics, the full linguistic content of an authoritative legal sentence is what the author intended to communicate by uttering it in a given context. Intentional content may go beyond literal meaning and contextual content, and has to be used to reduce linguistic indeterminacy in order to make legal communication successful. In the case of vague legal sentences, in particular, intentional content would be the only suitable means to determine whether a borderline case falls under the regulation in question.In this paper I argue that the picture just outlined does not provide a convincing explanation of how legal language works, since it does not consider the peculiar characteristics of institutional legal contexts. I then put forward an alternative account of linguistic content and vagueness in law, based on an inferentialist approach to semantics and pragmatics. On this account vagueness is a feature of language which depends on a specific form of disagreement between the participants in an exchange of reasons. By looking at the linguistic interplay between parties and judge in a legal dispute, the paper shows how vagueness arises and how it is reduced by courts in order to settle the case at issue. Ultimately, I suggest that the recourse to legislative intention in legal interpretation is simply a possible move in a linguistic game on which the content of law depends.