Originally Posted by
paulr
You guys were talking about scientific writing ... I think that and legal writing are interesting examples. In both fields, language often has to be worked and practically tortured to eliminate possibilities of misundersting. The ironic result is that often no one besides a specialist can understand it at all.
Even so there are abject failures, especially in law, which deals with ideas that are less concrete than the ones in science. We have distinct schools of constitutional interpretation, which are divided by the same hermeneutic principles that divide schools of scriptural interpretation and schools of literary interpretation. The differences of opinion concern the nature of meaning itself, and certainly the mutable nature of meaning in language.
The result is that two judges can have opposite interpretations of the same law, based entirely on their philosophical stances toward interpretation.
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