Re: RT list: the 'forthright negotiator' principle

hi all,

Many thanks Deirdre for that reference. For those interested, there
is also interesting work by the law scholars Adam Kramer and Lord
Hoffman, on legal precedents in the UK (and their justification) for
considering context, norms of communication, and intentions in ruling
on the "meaning" of contracts and statutes. While these scholars are
aware of and appeal to theoretical pragmatics, including Relevance
theory, it seems to me that there are some very subtle theoretical
points that are missed, that are highly relevant to the practical
issues involved.

For fun, and to be provocative: have a look at the US Supreme Court
ruling discussed in the opening pages of Stephen Neale's paper 'On
Location'. The court's decision hinged on their assessment of what a
particular phrase could be 'reasonably and normally' understood to
mean. Not only is their assessment mistaken in my humble opinion, but
no theoretical or empirical support for it is offered. (Ironically
enough their decision uses the very phrase, twice, in such a way as
to contradict their own assessment: extra credit for spotting either).

regards,
Nathan

On 17 Jan 2010, at 12:10, Deirdre Wilson wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Happy New Year, and thanks to Nick for his recent postings on
> matters of
> both content and procedure. I'd like to respond briefly to both.
>
> On the point Nick raised about the relation between pragmatic
> theory and legal
> interpretation, I wanted to draw attention to a forthcoming book by
> Alan Durant
> on Meaning in the Media: Discourse, Controversy and Debate (OUP,
> April 2010),
> which offers a very nice analysis of disputes about meaning in
> public life, and of
> the interacting linguistic, legal and social factors that affect
> their resolution. I've read
> a fair amount on the language of advertising, and generally been
> disappointed by
> both the lack of theoretical sophistication on the semantics-
> pragmatics end and the
> rather anecdotal nature of the analyses offered. By contrast, I was
> quite ignorant
> about legal issues connected with defamation, offensiveness,
> blasphemy, etc, and
> had no idea about how meaning disputes in these areas might be
> resolved, or
> what intuitive pragmatic principles are brought into play by
> lawyers in such disputes.
> I think the book does a great job of setting out the linguistic and
> pragmatic background in
> a very clear and sophisticated way, and of going on to show
> convincingly that these
> disputes invariably go beyond the purely linguistic or pragmatic,
> and can't be resolved
> without taking (possibly unintended) audience effects into account.
> I was reading it
> thinking about the implications for pragmatics, and I do think the
> book draws attention
> to an interesting set of cases in which speakers' intentions are
> constrained by the fact
> that they will be held legally responsible for the foreseeable
> effects of their utterances.
>
> On the procedural matter of how we can organise the list so as to
> maximise the
> chances of good discussion, I agree with Dan's suggestion (in a
> posting a while back)
> that we should restrict our postings in general to (a) brief
> announcements of forthcoming
> events/activities/publications likely to interest many members of
> the list, and (b) substantive
> comments/queries/discussions focusing mainly on relevance theory
> and its applications.
> I know of several members (including me) who have wanted to share
> questions with the
> list at various points, but have refrained for fear of being
> swamped. So thanks to Nick and
> Dan for raising this issue (and to Dan and Robyn for their recent
> postings, which I agree with),
> and let's try and make the list fun again.
>
> All the best,
> Deirdre
>
>
>
> At 14:20 14/01/2010, Nicholas Allott wrote:
>> Mark Liberman, blogging on legal interpretation in 'a case where
>> "some
>> of the best lawyers in the world, and the Delaware courts, couldn't
>> work out the meaning of what they had written"':
>>
>> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2045
>>
>> The judge in the case wrote: "under the forthright negotiator
>> principle, the subjective understanding of one party to a contract
>> may
>> bind the other party when the other party knows or has reason to know
>> of that understanding."
>>
>> Liberman comments: '[this] "forthright negotiator principle" ... is
>> certainly something that normal humans presuppose in their
>> communicative exchanges. It's part of why "theory of mind" reasoning
>> is hard."
>>
>>
>> It seems to me that there may be interesting things to say about this
>> (and that people on this list are likely to be able to say them). The
>> comments on the blog so far have mostly focussed instead on why (and
>> whether) judges write better than other lawyers.
>>
>>
>> By the way, there have been several interesting posts about legal
>> interpretation in the last couple of years on Language Log, most or
>> all of which are essentially case studies in applied pragmatics.
>>
>> Nick
>> (trying to practise what I preach)
>>
>>
>>
>> Nicholas Allott
>> Postdoctoral research fellow
>> CSMN
>> University of Oslo
>>
>> n.e.allott@csmn.uio.no
>> nicholas.allott@gmail.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> -----------------------------
> Deirdre Wilson
>
> UCL Linguistics
> Room 114
> Chandler House
> 2 Wakefield Street
> London WC1N 1PF
> -----------------------------
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>
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>
>
Received on Sun Jan 17 13:20:10 2010