Who Fears the Anti-literalist Bogeyman? On Paolo Sandro’s Meaning-determinism

The paper is devoted to deepening the philosophical background of Paolo Sandro’s conceptual distinction between law-application and law-creation. In §1, I present his main arguments for this distinction, which recommend the adoption of Mario Jori’s macro-pragmatics combined with text-act theory and semantic minimalism. I then offer an alternative characterization of their rival conceptions, skepticism and contextualism in §2, before raising five objections to Sandro’s a- contextualist meaning-determinism, to show how its persuasiveness depends on a misleading conception of language, the fixed-code fallacy – to borrow Roy Harris’ captivating label.