On Tue, 11 Jun 2013, Kerim Aydin wrote: > http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/slfreflw.htm
And of course http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/psa/index.htm (first appearance of Nomic is in appendix 3). I'd forgotten how clearly and concisely this has been laid out from the beginning. Really should be required reading around here... "Lawyers and logicians also have different concepts of solving a problem. If a paradox is compared to a maze, lawyers would be content to "solve" it by knocking down the walls, if the relevant rules did not forbid it. To a logician that would be the height of intellectual dishonesty and self-deception. But we should not think the lawyer's "solution" a cheat, for it is a solution to a different problem; or, from another perspective, it is an optimum defined by different constraints. To the logician the problem is abstract and epistemic: how to understand the paradoxical statement and the system of rules pertaining to meaning and truth in order to bring the two into harmony at the least cost to the bodies of logical and mathematical science. To the lawyer the problem is concrete and practical: how best to adjudicate the interests of these two parties, or how best to achieve a certain state of affairs, in accordance with an inherited system of rules that contains material content, vagueness, ambiguity, and inconsistency."
