Ordinary Meaning and Consilience of Evidence

Abstract

In this chapter I note two recent trends, one in experimental jurisprudence and one in experimental philosophy. First, some work in experimental jurisprudence has pushed for moving beyond textual sources, including the use of linguistic corpora, and toward questionnaire methods in analyzing ordinary meaning. Second, some work in experimental philosophy has urged that we should look to move beyond the use of questionnaire methods and toward the use of linguistic corpora in analyzing ordinary concepts. There is a methodological tension here that suggests further investigation. I do so by considering the legal hypothetical of a prohibition on vehicles in a park that has featured prominently in the back-and-forth over the use of corpus methods in legal interpretation. Taking a closer look at this example, including extending previous corpus analyses, I argue that corpus and questionnaire methods in fact paint a remarkably similar picture of the ordinary use of "vehicle." I hold that this highlights how these methods can compliment each other, and conclude that when it comes to difficult empirical questions-such as those that arise in assessing ordinary meaning and ordinary concepts-we should aim to employ multiple sources of information to arrive at a consilience of evidence.Both philosophy and legal interpretation are often concerned with assessing the ordinary meaning of important terms or phrases (or with the concepts beings expressed by those terms when used with their ordinary meaning). 2 And researchers in both areas have begun to urge that ordinary meaning is an empirical question. Interestingly, some recent work in these areas suggests seemingly opposed views about the use of one source of empirical evidence in investigating ordinary meaning-the tools of corpus linguistics. Some work in experimental jurisprudence has pushed for moving beyond textual sources, including the use of linguistic corpora, and toward survey methods in legal interpretation (Tobia 2020, Klapper et al. forthcoming). In fact, Klapper et al. seem to suggest that we should prefer survey methods over 1 Forthcoming in Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law edited by Stefan Magen and Karolina Prochownik. I want to thank Eugen Fischer, Kevin Tobia, and Pascale Willemsen for their extremely helpful suggestions. 2 This is not to say that researchers in these areas are after exactly the same thing, and indeed legal interpretation typically focuses on the ordinary or public meaning of a term given the context of some legal text, while philosophers tend to focus on analyzing ordinary concepts more generally, even if this is sometimes restricted to certain contexts (such as that provided by a given thought experiment).