On Abductive Reasoning and Legal Language

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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I’m going to try to make this as unconvoluted as possible, so please bear with me.

OK so many people believe that language games yield an indeterminancy debate in law. That is legislators can’t legislate laws which adjudicators will definitely adjudicate according to because adjudicators can interpret language as they see fit.

This leads to situations where people challenge adjudicators with reductio ad absurdum arguments AKA “What do you think this means?” Eventually, it leads to accusations of illiteracy where adjudicators can’t communicate, and adjudicators make appeals to popularity as proof that they can communicate because they’re uniting in common with a quantity of people that’s significant, larger, and/or a majority.

Basically, I’m outlining the basis of socially democratic or traditionally conservative interpretations of the rule of law here. Those who interpret words normally are right, and those who interpret words abnormally are wrong. This leads to the rule of law tolerating violations of rights to privacy and due process because abnormal people supposedly just don’t get what rights to privacy and due process actually exist. Only those who are normal are entitled to rights to privacy and due process, but that defeats the purpose of them in the first place since people are expected to conform to what’s normal anyway.

OK! SO ASSUMING YOU’VE GOTTEN THROUGH THAT… :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

…how can anyone claim that the rule of law genuinely exists as distinguished from a state of nature?

I’m asking this because the definition of “rule of law” would be subject to the utility preferences, temperaments, and attitudes that people are born with into the world. Those who are born abnormally would be doomed to malicious prosecution and negligence by those who are born normally. Those who are born normally could manipulate the indeterminancy debate as an excuse to adjudicate according to the interpretations of words that they want. For example, they could rewrite context out of syntax just to show how someone’s interpretations of words are arbitrarily dogmatic. After all, just because someone says a word has a definition doesn’t make it so. Normal people will make appeals to cohesion, instead of correspondence, in order to justify their style of communication.

This means words cannot have their definition deduced since there’s no reliable necessity-contingency relationship. Instead, the appropriate definition of words would be learned from experience and applied where it’s practical. However, people would be expected to anticipate in advance of experience what’s practical. That is they wouldn’t simply learn from experience through trial and error because that’s a ridiculous pain in the neck given the amount of reiteration required to do so. Instead, people would be expected to abductively reason the appropriate definition of words in imagining a sufficient, but not necessary, explanation for how words relate with one another when things are explained.

However, this sufficiency clause is still a problem because the amount of sufficiency required to relate words with one another is subjective. Again, we’re stuck with the normal versus abnormal debate. There’s also a problem in how many-to-one relationships might exist for sufficiency. For example, just because a certain quantity of sufficiency is expected doesn’t mean there is only one sufficient solution to a problem. I expect this is something that both cultural relativists and assimilationists can agree upon. After all, both relativists and assimilationists can appreciate the particular nuances of language, and how nuances exist diversely among different communities.

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I like this argument, which I will simplify the conclusion of to
the rule of law=the rule of nature

It is polemical, your argument. I do not Think that law, while interpretable, is utterly flexible. It would be hard to put someone to Death for jaywalking - to use an extreme example. IOW while judicial and other temperments and interpretations, politics, media and other distortions influence applicaiton and interpretation of law, law still set limits and presses processes in certain directions with some consistency.

It’s a bit like our own minds. If you have a bunch of moral rules or other heuristics, in your own mind, about how one should behave - to be successful or to be good - these may guide ‘natural’ impulses, restrain them, limit them, but are also affected very strongly by them. We fool ourselves into thinking it was really Ok to do what we did because of X, for example.

Still, we do end up getting limited.

(and welcome back!)

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It’s not just the language that they interpret.

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To be clear, the point was how do people honestly claim it exists, not whether or not what they claim honestly exists. I’m talking about the thought process which goes through their mind which enables them to unite in common with others through language arts.

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What else do they?

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Their assumptions about the mind set of the people who wrote the laws, and their assumptions about the prevailing ideas of the time in which the laws were written are results of interpretations of things other than language which have an effect on how the law is applied.

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…but how do they make assumptions about people’s mindsets independently of the language used to communicate mindsets?

Did you read the end when I wrote about abductive reasoning being used to appropriately define sufficient explanation?

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Look, if language is the only way to describe anything, then there’s nothing to pointing it out.

Stop acting like you can’t understand what context means dude. Letter of the law = what is says on the page in front of you. The problem is that as we’ve seen with so many texts in history, there are always multiple interpretations.

So the spirit of the law has to be determined so that we know which interpretation to use. It’s a bit more complicated. We always interpret the same few ways, and you can’t just make up your own way, and in most cases people do it wrong. It’s just really hard stuff man. But if you read something written 100 years ago, you can try and think of what they must have meant based on what you understand the context to have been in which they were writing. So that’s what they do man. I don’t make the rules.

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The legal arena, while subject to the use of language which is of course open to interpretation, does provide difficulties, though I very much doubt these difficulties are experienced by adjudicators.

Like any arena, there are conventions and rules. Despite the various interpretations of the law, the judge is established as the legal ‘interpreter’ of the law, and the lawyers make ‘suggestions’. While “legal illiteracy” would indeed be a problem, judges and experienced lawyers are accustomed to the law, are educated in law, and are experienced in the courtroom. They know what the law is, the history, and how to convey their accusations and defense.

The people who suffer from ’ legal illiteracy’ in the court are not the judges and lawyers, it is the people who must defend themselves. While they may accuse a lawyer of ‘illiteracy’, rest assured, it is they who fail to communicate.

Just look at judge mathis.

“He stole my car”

“was it insured?”

“Yes, but not legally, we had a verbal agreement.”

“Do you have proof?”

“I have a recording”

“That constitutes a verbal agreement. Judgement for the plaintiff.”

The car theif may accuse illiteracy and say the car was a ‘gift’, who was illiterate?

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The smirk on the defendant’s face.

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Some defendants aren’t guilty.