Lincoln on Axiomatic Shifting Paradigms: Wittgenstein's Language-Games, Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, Language, Law, and the Limits of Formalism

Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln, IV, University of Groningen, Faculty of Law, has published Axiomatic Shifting Paradigms: Wittgenstein’s Language-Games, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Language, Law, and the Limits of Formalism at 47 U. Ark. Little Rock L. Rev. 133 (2025). Here is the abstract.

This Article shows how Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of “language-games” and Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems mark the outer limits of legal formalism and other leading interpretive theories—textualism, originalism, and purposivism. It begins by tracing Wittgenstein’s progression from a “picture theory” of language to the view that social context drives meaning more than any simple correspondence between words and reality. Gödel’s work on formal systems, suggesting that mathematics—long held as the pinnacle of logical certainty—itself cannot be both consistent and complete, reinforces the notion that purely “logical” approaches cannot capture the full range of linguistic and social nuances at play in law. Next, the Article examines how the late-nineteenth-century “scientific” movement in legal education, associated with Harvard Law School, underlies many assumptions about formalism. It then compares textualism, originalism, and purposivism, each grappling—but ultimately unable to resolve—the deep ambiguities that language poses. By exploring examples such as grammar debates, the sorites paradox (on vagueness), and Wittgenstein’s concept of language as shared practice, the Article shows why no interpretive framework can truly eliminate uncertainty or encapsulate the ever-evolving nature of the meaning of legal texts. Finally, the Article proposes a “dialectical sublation” of these rival schools of interpretation. Rather than clinging to the impossible dream of perfect textual clarity, it urges jurists and legal theorists to accept the fluidity and contingency inherent in language—and to build that understanding into their interpretive methods.

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Wolcher on Ronald Dworkin's Wittgenstein @routledgebooks

Louis E. Wolcher, University of Washington School of Law, is publishing Ronald Dworkin's Wittgenstein in Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers (A. Khani & G. Kemp, eds., Routledge) (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Wittgenstein’s influence on the legal theory of the late Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013) is an excellent illustration of the truth of the former’s statement, “The seed I’m most likely to sow is a certain jargon.” Dworkin, one of the most prolific and important legal philosophers of his era, developed a distinctly normative theory that links the rule of law, legal rights, and legal interpretation to the claimed objective unity of legal, moral, and political values, especially in the United States. In doing so he relied directly for support on the authority of Wittgenstein’s concepts “language-games” and “form of life,” and indirectly on the latter’s anti-metaphysical insight (in Dworkin’s words) that “the key to meaning is use.” This chapter discusses both the few points of contact and the large areas of divergence between the methods and goals of these two thinkers. It does so from two opposite yet complimentary perspectives, which it calls “Dworkin’s Wittgenstein” and “Wittgenstein’s Dworkin.” It concludes that Wittgenstein would not have recognized Dworkin’s writings as philosophy but would (perhaps) have respected them as expressions of a secular kind of religious faith – a Religion Without God as the title of Dworkin’s last book would have it.

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A Review of Mariano Croce's "Self-Sufficiency of Law"

Andrew Halpin, National University of Singapore (NUS), Faculty of Law, has published The Search for Law at 5 Jurisprudence 410 (2014). Here is the abstract.

This review essay of Mariano Croce’s Self-Sufficiency of Law takes the opportunity to reflect on the wider jurisprudential enterprise while examining Croce’s stimulating book. Croce’s basic pursuit of a distinctive subject matter of law, and the theory to accompany it, explores a rich variety of sources and offers key observations on the distinguishing characteristic of law, the relationship between legal and social normativity, and the use of analytical legal theory. Croce makes his task more arduous by confronting legal and social pluralism, and offers as his own solution a composite theoretical position drawing in particular on Hart, Wittgenstein, classical Italian legal institutionalism, and Hoebel. The position is crowned by Croce’s understanding of transsectionality, which claims both empirical and analytical virtues in distinguishing law’s distinctive form of social normativity. In the course of providing a critical assessment of Croce’s position, more general questions are raised about the strategic uses of other theorists’ work, different possible views of how to approach the diversity of theoretical perspectives, and whether the search for law should conclude or start with a body.

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Wittgenstein and Tax Law

Bret N. Bogenschneider, Vienna University of Economics and Business, has published Wittgenstein on Why Tax Law is Comprehensible in volume 252 of the British Tax Review. Here is the abstract.

The field of taxation now includes a growing body of technical language. Such tax words are not merely “labels” for various economic events (as implied by the theory of semantic formalism) as tax terminology must be contextualised consistently with Wittgenstein’s later theory of linguistics. The current debate over GAARs may constitute an example of Wittgenstein’s “signposts” which mitigate in favour of the Rule of Law and not against it. Furthermore, the proffered choice as between principles versus detail in tax legislation reflects a false dichotomy. The common averment to scepticism (or nihilism) within tax jurisprudence indicates a failure to understand the logical basis or modalities and scientific nature of tax law. The technical language of taxation is indicative of an emerging scientific discipline.

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Ludwig's Way

Bert Van Roermund, Tilburg Law School, Tilburg School of Humanities, Tilburg Law School, has published Rules as Icons: Wittgenstein's Paradox and the Law, at 26 Ratio Juris 538 (2013). Here is the abstract.

In this paper Section 1 distinguishes between two modes of interpreting legal rules: rehearsal and discourse, arguing that the former takes priority over the latter in law, as in many other contexts. Section 2 offers two arguments that following a legal rule in the rehearsing mode presents a riddle. The first argument develops from law, and submits that legal rules do not tell us anything, because they are tautological. The second one develops from philosophy (Wittgenstein's later works), confronting us with the paradox that incompatible courses of action may be derived from any rule. My solution presents a theory of rules as icons (Section 3). I use “icon” rather than “picture,” partly to avoid confusion with what is known among philosophers as “the picture theory of meaning.” Interpretation in the rehearsing mode hinges on imagination: imagining oneself in the space of reasons for action rather than reasoning oneself. In this act of imagination, we project ourselves into the rule in ways that are similar to the way we grasp the sense of paintings, music, stories, or poems. Finally (Section 4) I will defend the position that my view solves the puzzles in the second section, by arguing (a) that it is a better account of what Wittgenstein wrote than two competing theories (intuitionism and conventionalism), and (b) that it provides a more satisfactory account of how lawyers deal with legal rules in actual practice.

The full text is not available from SSRN.