Interpretive Scorekeeping

According to the Italian law, having acted for petty motives constitutes an aggravating circumstance of an offense. We sketch in this paper two interpretive accounts of what the legal expression ‘petty motives’ means: one according to the standard semantic explanation of content, the other according to an inferential explanation of content. Such an inferential explanation is based on a pragmatic account of semantics and a deontic scorekeeping model of interpretation inspired by the philosophical work of Robert Brandom. The resulting model of legal interpretation is what we call “Interpretive Scorekeeping”. We start by briefly considering in Section 1 the semantics/pragmatics debate in contemporary philosophy of language and relatively to legal interpretation. Then we sketch in Section 2 a semantic explanation of the expression ‘petty motives’. In Section 3 we consider the articulation between a pragmatics of semantic content and an inferentialist conception of content. Then in Section 4 we sketch an inferential explanation of the expression ‘petty motives’. Finally, we consider in Sections 5 and 6 some possible advantages and drawbacks of Inferentialism applied to legal interpretation and adjudication