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Mario Jori, "On Touchie, Logic and the Universe", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law / Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique Vol. XI no.31 (1998), 59-65: My bottom line is the following. I think that Touchie's central argument against Jackson is wrong, but in being wrong he raises several important points about Jackson's epistemology and legal theory. Touchie's central argument is that Jackson cannot argue both that reference always requires individual choices, and at the same time that (pure) propositional logic, being a rigorous calculus, does not require such choices or decisions. According to Touchie, Jackson can either be "sceptic" or "non-sceptic" about both logic and reference. On the contrary, Jackson says that interpretive decisions are required only by reference, the applying or interpreting or ascribing words and sentences to actual facts.

Where Touchie in my opinion is wrong is about formal logic. Pure formal logic is indeed a rigorous calculus involving no choices apart from accepting the rules of the logic game. On the other hand, I agree with the other part of Touchie's argument, that the amount of choice required by concrete acts of reference (ascribing language to things) can be variably reduced by making the language more precise. I agree that such interpretive choices can be reduced to a practical nil for the normal purposes of particular kinds of descriptions (the easy cases in jurisprudence and the normal cases in ordinary life and language). e-mail jori@fildir.unimi.it

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