The relevance of philosophical theories of vagueness to legal interpretation

The paper presents a careful analysis of an application of different philosophical theories of vagueness to legal interpretation. The author argues for the following Irrelevance Thesis: it is irrelevant to legal interpretation which specific philosophical theory of vagueness is to be preferred. In order to establish this thesis, we should distinguish between conceptual clarifications about the nature of vagueness and related phenomena on the one hand and various philosophical theories of vagueness on the other. With regard to many of those clarificatory matters (which the author takes to include specifications about the differences between semantic vagueness and similar phenomena such as ambiguity, generality, and pragmatic vagueness), philosophers widely agree with each other; controversies here mainly arise about how to best define different kinds of vagueness. The situation is different when we consider distinct philosophical accounts on vagueness, such as supervaluationism, contextualism, and degree theories; here, it is a matter of much controversy which theory is to be preferred. The author argues that, while knowledge of what precisely vagueness is bears importance for anyone who works with legal texts, the question of which philosophical theory can best explain vagueness has surprisingly little impact on legal interpretation. For this purpose it is necessary to survey over the most prominent theories of vagueness, to analyse the role that vagueness plays in legal interpretation, and to point out why this role is independent from whatever theory of vagueness is actually correct. The author also discusses recent accounts from Scott Soames and Stephen Schiffer, who both claim to deduce norms for legal interpretation from specific accounts on vagueness. That leads the author to the conclusion: what holds for theories of vagueness holds for theories of meaning as well, namely, they only explain linguistic phenomena, but do not suggest specific ways of using words or interpreting vague expressions.

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