Justice Dept. defends secret rulings in new spy court filing

Re:Justice Dept. defends secret rulings in new spy court filing by inopinatus on Monday July 08, 2013 @07:41PM (#6010147)

I'll see your point but raise you: the absolute soundness of an argument is distinct from our ability to determine that soundness.

This isn't just a technical incompleteness argument; the law is not written using a propositional calculus, but rather an imprecise semantic encoding (which we might refer to as "Legal English") that is subject to multiple interpretations.

So in the case of law it is possible/likely/inevitable that the argument is, by the use of natural language, itself ambiguous, so the soundness thereof is a vector state.

Or to put it in simpler terms: it is all a matter of opinion.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Justice Dept. defends secret rulings in new spy court filing by cldr on Monday July 08, 2013 @07:43PM (#6010155)

We can say that reality is a matter of opinion but we can't have that much useful discourse that way :) And in my comment I meant to refer to his statement "if you are in favor of..." which, even if soundness is subjective, doesn't have to do with soundness at all.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Justice Dept. defends secret rulings in new spy court filing by inopinatus on Monday July 08, 2013 @07:52PM (#6010205)

Thanks for the clarification. It had rather sounded like you were trying to apply the rules of logic to human law, which is of course like trying to urinate in a hurricane.

[ Parent | on HN ]