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

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