Our Dynamic Lexicon

Northwestern's Peter Ludlow, a leading philosopher working at the intersection of semantics and linguistics, gives a brief sketch of an important, contemporary line of thought about language and meaning that is also relevant to questions of interpretation in the law.  (His column appears in a blog series at the New York Times ostensibly devoted to philosophy, though I should warn readers that many of the entries are quite bad, largely due to the fact that the moderator for the series is an incompetent.  But every now and then, work by substantial philosophers does appear.)