Introduction
Law students soon learn that the interpretation of legal texts is one of the most important things that lawyers and judges do. In a previous Legal Theory Lexicon entry, a distinction was made between "interpretation" and "construction." Although we could use other words to express the distinction, it expresses an important conceptual difference between two activities: (1) discovering the "meaning" of a legal text, and (2) determining the legal effect given to the text. Thus, statutory interpretation aims to recover the meaning of the words and phrases of a statute in context, whereas statutory construction provides the legal norms that courts will use to apply the text to the facts of a particular case.
With this distinction in mind, we can ask the question, "How do we figure out the meaning of a legal text?" In some cases, we can tell what the statute unambiguously means without asking the "how" question. But other cases are more difficult. When there is an argument about what a statute means, it may be helpful to turn to theoretical linguistics and the philosophy of language for an a theory of communication.
One such theory was developed by the philosopher Paul Grice. A key component of Grice's theory is the distinction between "speaker's meaning" and "sentence meaning." Although most lawyers have never heard of Grice, every lawyer has an intuitive grasp of the difference between literal meaning (the bare meaning of the words as combined by syntax and punctuation) and the meaning that a speaker or author intended to convey in context. This entry in the Lexicon provides a basic introduction to Grice's ideas. As always, the Lexicon is aimed at law students, especially first year law students, with an interest in legal theory.
Speaker's Meaning
The meaning that a speaker or author intended to convey to a listener or reader is what Grice calls "speaker's meaning." And Grice developed a very precise and illuminating theory. Grice uses the word "utterance" to refer to oral communications, and I will use that word as well. For Grice the speaker's meaning of an utterance is the meaning that the speaker intended to convey to the listener via the listener's grasp of the speaker's communicative intentions.
Wow! That sounds complicated! Let's unpack Grice's formulation step by step. We can start with an example. It is a Tuesday and the following exchange takes place:
Ben says to Alice: "Pizza day!"
Alice says, "Great! See you there."
Suppose that in context, when Ben says "Pizza day!" he means to say: "Today is the day that we usually have Pizza at Lampo's at noon, and I don't have a conflict." But he doesn't have to spell it out, because Alice knows that every Tuesday, Ben and Alice have Pizza at Lampo's every Tuesday at noon unless Ben has a meeting. When Ben says "Pizza day," Alice relies on her background knowledge and grasps that by saying "Pizza day!" Ben is conveying that he plans to meet her for Pizza. By replying "Great! See you there", Alice conveys that she is pleased and that she will be at Lampo's at noon today.
Notice that the content communicated by Ben and Alice is much richer in content than the literal meaning of their utterances. This brings us to the idea of "sentence meaning."
Sentence Meaning
Grice contrasted the speaker's meaning of a particular utterance on a particular occasion with sentence meaning. The sentence meaning of an utterance is simply the literal meaning of the words, phrases, and sentences. The literal meaning of "Pizza day" is very sparse. Pizza is a food consisting of a crust and toppings such tomato sauce and cheese. Day is a unit of time. The phrase "pizza day" could mean any number of things. It might be a day upon which there are pizzas--pizza day at the cafeteria. Or it might be a day when a particular person, Vibiana, ate a slice of pizza. Or it could be the day when the refrigerated truck delivers frozen pizzas to the market. The expression "pizza day" is incomplete when it is considered out of context. It has meaning, but that meaning is sparse.
Of course, "pizza day" isn't even a grammatically complete sentence, but we can imagine Ben saying, "Today is pizza day," which is a grammatically complete sentence. Notice, however, that the literal meaning of "Today is pizza day." is still ambiguous. It could express that idea that today is the day Ben and Alice have pizza for lunch or the day when the truck delivers frozen pizzas to the market. This grammatically complete sentence does not express a complete thought if it is considered without any context.
The account of sentence meaning that I have just offered is simplified. Grice's own explication of this idea changed over time and was expressed in technical language. But I hope that I have conveyed the gist of his idea. The speaker's meaning of an utterance is the meaning of the utterance on a particular occasion--the meaning that the speaker intended to convey. The sentence meaning of an utterance is the meaning that the words have generally and is a function of the conventional semantic meanings of word and phrases as combined by the conventions and regularities of syntax (and in the case of written communication, punctuation as well).
The Relevance of Speaker's Meaning and Sentence Meaning to Legal Interpretation
There are many different theories of legal interpretation and their vocabulary differs with context. Let's use statutory interpretation and construction as an example. There are three basic views of statutory interpretation:
- Textualism: the legal norms that implement a statute should be determined by plain meaning of the statutory text.
- Purposivism: the legal norms that implement a statute should be determined by the objective purpose of the statute, where objective purpose is understood as the purpose that an ideal legislature would have had in enacting the statutory text.
- Intentionalism: the legal norms that implement a statue should be determined by the subjective policy preferences of the actual legislators that enacted the statute.
The distinction between speaker's meaning and sentence meaning allows us clarify these theories. For example, textualism is sometimes criticized on the grounds that textualists are literalists who ignore context; in other words, the critics assume that textualists aim to recover the sentence meaning of the statutory text. Textualists themselves deny this. They argue that they are concerned with the meaning of the statutory text but only for the purpose of clarifying the meaning that the statute conveyed. In other words, they are aiming to recover something that is more like speaker's meaning than it is like sentence meaning. Purposivism, on the other hand, is only indirectly concerned with the meaning of the statute: because purposivists are after an idealized purpose they may sometimes prefer to focus literal meanings (sentence meaning) to contextualized meanings (speaker's meaning)--because the very sparseness of sentence meaning creates an empty vessel into which a judge's version of objective purpose may be poured.
Likewise, the idea of speaker's meaning helps us to understand intentionalism. Intentionalism is concerned with intentions, but the kind of intention is not the communicative intentions that Grice's idea of speaker's meaning uses. Instead, intentionalists are concerned with policy preferences. This distinction is important. If intentionalism aimed to recover the communicative intentions of the legislature, it would actually be a form of textualism. In my experience, it is common for discussions of statutory interpretation to equivocate on this issue. When that happens, conceptual confusion results.
Conclusion
There is much more to be said about the speaker's meaning, sentence meaning, and legal communication, but I hope that this entry in the Lexicon has given readers a basic understanding of Grice's distinction and the ways in which it can shed light on questions of legal theory.
Related Lexicon Entries
Bibliography
(This entry in the Legal Theory Lexicon was first created on October 25, 2020.)