Chapter 63: Public Language and Law

Language is not merely a private instrument of thought; it is a shared infrastructure that enables institutional coordination, legal adjudication, and collective deliberation. This chapter examines public language as the symbolic medium through which communities stabilize meaning, and legal language as the limit case where the diagrammatic register is pressed toward maximal precision. The analysis reveals a structural trade-off: precision shrinks semantic neighbourhoods, reducing ambiguity at the cost of expressive flexibility. Wittgenstein’s private language argument is reframed within the categorical setting: what the argument correctly identifies is the publicity condition for symbolic labels, not a constraint on subsymbolic patterns.