Lev Lafayette wrote:
When the law is mis-written and the defendant gets off with the loophole or other reason for the mis-written law, then it is up the the parliamentray system to correct the law so that it cannot be mis-interpretted again. Mis-interpreted? So interpretation of words does play a role!
Interpreting according to the "spirit of the law" (literally, there is no such thing), involves judges making decisions according to contextual and current interpretation, according to their interpretation of what the legislatives intended with the law.
It is actually unavoidable in any meaning-based language (e.g., excluding computer "languages") not to engage in interpretation.
But here's the rub; if I intend one thing by a word I have spoken or written, but someone else ether 'receives' no meaning, a different meaning or a multitude of meanings; then communication is not taking place. Take the word 'interpretation', since it is relevant, one person might intend 'disambiguation.' whilst another might intend substitution of : 'the real meaning' , the original (etymological) meaning or just their own idiosyncratic meaning. Whilst one might think this area would form a fundamental part of linguistics, my reading of popular books on the subject finds a frustrating lack of content. Of course the theory of reconstruction of sentence meaning; ie.sentence semantics is well developed but questions like: "What kind of thing (ontologically) is a word ?" " What kind of thing is the definition of a word ? " What kind of thing and what is the purpose of the dictionary definition of a word ?; seem to fall in a never-never land between ontology and language. The situation is not helped by a seeming tendency of linguistics to: 1/ want to treat language as a natural phenomena, where questions of purpose are not applicable, rather than as a social artifact where they are and 2/ to want to treat words as a purely objectively observable phenomena, when it seems apparent that as symbols this may be so; but the referents of those symbols seem to be categories of subjective experience. regards Rohan McLeod