How does one determine the meaning of a 200+ year-old document? Does it mean what it was understood to mean in the eighteenth century? Or what it is understood to mean today? Or what the morally best reading would be? Or does it mean what certain authoritative interpreters say that it means? How does the Objectivist epistemology help answer these questions? This presentation will show how legal interpretation, especially of documents that were the product of a group effort rather than of a single person, depends on two related subjects: a theory of concepts and a theory of language.
Gary Lawson will propose answers that are somewhat different from those provided by Tara Smith, a noted Objectivist philosopher, and he will explain why and how they reach their various conclusions.
