Digging

For the last eight years I have been downloading papers to read later, and mostly not reading them.  The file now has 203 items.  Yes, time to start on t e read later part of the project.  Most of the items are law review articles, which are normally far too long for what they have to say.  It is not too far off to suppose that in a 40 page article, there will 3 or 4 pages that actually offer up an argument with the rest being recitation of what others have said and canvassing related discussions and objections.  What order to read them?  Alphabetical by file title is the way, because they are otherwise not organized.  So I can start at the top of the folder and keep going.  First up is something titled Two Takes on Truth in Normative Discourse, from which I learned that Dworkin's "corpus [is] plainly unmatched by any other figure in law and philosophy."  I didn't know.  What the essay actually argues is that Dworkin has a coherentist theory of truth for normative fields (at least for morality and law) which is enough to retain allegiance to a right answer thesis in law.  Quine and Wittgenstein saved us from a correspondence theory of truth, and that is enough to get truth claims back into the moral world.  Well, I don't know that this will succeed.  It takes some work to get from coherentist theories to a single right answer to every legal dispute.  Fair to leave that for another day and a longer excursis, but not to blithely assume that the road is clear.  Or maybe it is going toward the idea that 'truth' in the context of legal conflict and interpretation is a very useful metaphor.