Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Language Philosophy & Legal Interpretation

Randy Barnett over at The Volokh Conspiracy references Lawrence Solum, a law professor at University of Illinois College of Law, who wrote a lengthy post on constitutional interpretation called "Semantic and Normative Originalism: Comments on Brian Leiter’s “Justifying Originalism.”

I first became interested in linguistics via language philosophy and speech act theory, so I always have a soft spot for debates that involve theories of meaning, as this legal one does (Solum actually references Grice, hehe). It’s a long and complicate post involving legal issues I have no special knowledge of, but I’m interested in teasing apart the Grice reference to see if it has legs, or if it’s yet another example of naïve linguistics gone wrong.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi I'm Steve
I would like to tell you about one of my discoveries: The Alphabet is Hieroglyphic. I've chosen the word SOUP as my example, but mind you, I have many others. Proving the alphabet is hieroglyphic is my contribution to Linguistics.

The P is SOUP is a PICTURE of a spoon. The U is a PICTURE of a cup/bowl/kettle. The S is the steam rising or the soup being poured. The O is the ring around the cup/bowl/kettle.

So, take a pen and write each one of these items down adding them together and look at the picture. Who ever invented the word SOUP in English designed it by seeing each letter as a PICTURE.

Hope you enjoyed this item. Stephen Kellogg Brooks
Amateur Cryptographer
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