Where does interpretation collide?

The judicial task of determining what a statute or constitutional provision means and how it applies to the case at hand: a court draws on the text and its ordinary meaning, on the purpose behind the enactment, and on settled canons of construction, and the schools of textualism and purposivism disagree over which of these should govern. Eskridge's 1987 Dynamic statutory interpretation argued that a statute's meaning is not frozen at enactment but is reshaped as courts apply it to circumstances the drafters never foresaw. The referent is an institutional practice of reading authoritative legal texts, argued in briefs and fixed in judgments, and it is not the assignment of truth values in logic, the general philosophy of understanding, or the live rendering of speech between languages.[1]

Unit

A legal text's meaning settled for a case by a court

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Judged by the reasoning of opinions, by fidelity to text, purpose, and canon, and by whether higher courts affirm the reading

In formal logic, an interpretation is an assignment of meaning to the non-logical symbols of a formal language: it fixes a domain of objects and tells each constant, function, and predicate what it denotes, so that every sentence of the language comes out true or false. Such a structure, or model, is what makes the sentences of a theory determinate, and Tarski's 1944 The semantic conception of truth defined truth recursively through satisfaction in an interpretation, grounding formal semantics. The referent is a precise mathematical object that valuates a formal language, with no vagueness and no appeal to a reader's judgement, unlike a court construing a statute, a philosopher understanding a text, or an interpreter voicing a speaker in another tongue.[2]

Unit

An assignment of denotations that valuates a formal language

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Given exactly by a domain and an interpretation function, and checked by whether a theory's sentences come out true under it

In hermeneutics, interpretation is the theory and practice of understanding meaning in texts and in meaningful human action, of making explicit what an expression says to us across the distance of language, history, and culture. Understanding moves in a circle between the whole and its parts and between the reader's own horizon and the text's, and Ricoeur's 1973 The model of the text extended this reading to social action, arguing that a deed can be construed like a text once it is fixed in its consequences. The referent is a general philosophical account of how meaning is grasped and appropriated, reflective and open-ended, not the court's binding construction of a statute, a logician's valuation of symbols, or the interpreter's real-time relay of speech.[3]

Unit

An understanding of a text or action recovered by a reader

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Weighed by the coherence and depth of the reading and by how well it accounts for the whole in the light of its parts

In literary theory, interpretation refers to recovering the author's intended verbal meaning, as distinct from a text's changing significance to readers. This meaning comes from Hirsch (1967) in Validity in interpretation.[4]

Unit

Recovery means

Measured by