Musing on Language, Codification and Qualification
Ben is presenting a paper tomorrow which compares the language and interpretation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms[link] with the codified Edict in Timothy Findley’s Not wanted on the Voyage.
And it got me to thinking¦
It struck me that the language of the law is rarely specific - it is couched in general terms - hedged about with ifs and buts - rarely couched in absolutes. In fact the language of the law is constructed carefully to avoid absolute or exact statements. Its all about nuance and relativity. This (I would suggest) is precisely because the law’s decisions are themselves so final and absolute - Guilty or Not Guilty. So since the decisions of the law are absolute, the “wiggle room” to allow for reality must be provided by a language that deliberately avoids commitment.
Section 27 - Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms : “This charter shall be interpreted”
This is not so in science however. Science is quintessentially relative and contingent - it is expected that today’s hypothesis might be disproved or changed on the basis of new discoveries and research. So to make it easier to test a hypothesis, it must avoid ambiguity and nuance. In fact hypotheses are constructed in absolute terms. Often it is the facts, the observations that are nuanced, hedged about with observational error bars and quantified sampling errors.
In my own field of software development, we are starting to move beyond the strictly typed mathematical languages of Java and C#, and becoming more comfortable with (lispers and smalltalkers would say re-discovering) the freedom and “wiggle room” that comes with untyped or dynamic languages such as ruby, python etc. Given these languages inherent flexibility, we constrain our solutions with the unit tests that we write - almost as legal interpretations are constrained by precedent - or scientific hypotheses are constrained by experimentation.
Don’t read too much into this - allegories can only go so far, and I’m not really getting at anything - but I found it an interesting train of thought.