Document Type
Article
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.
Recommended Citation
Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV,
Axiomatic Shifting Paradigms: Wittgenstein’s Language-Games, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Language, Law, and the Limits of Formalism,
47 U. Ark. Little Rock L. Rev. 133
(2025).
Available at: https://lawrepository.ualr.edu/lawreview/vol47/iss2/1
