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Riddles, legal decisions, and Peirce’s Existential Graphs

As my title suggests, Peirce's Existential Graphs, legal decisions, and riddles are members of a relationship that has not been examined from the perspective of semiotics. It is a relationship that, at first glance, seems to resemble Lewis Carroll's conjunct, 'cabbages and kings'. And like the walrus, this paper discusses paradox, nonsense, and incongruity in a significant way. By juxtaposing two or more conventionally established and well-known frames of reference, the riddle presents the possibility of new relationships; the solution, which is a sign of evaluative, interpretive judgment, is initially perceived with surprise, the same quality of surprise that attends the perception of the grotesque in aesthetics. The function of the grotesque, as we know, is to convey new value. Although the riddle's propositions are given as if they were truth statements, the underlying logic of the riddle has the same structure as Peirce's modalities of possibility, as I will later attempt to show. The problem of the legal decision is central in discussions of philosophy of law and of jurisprudence today. Consider, for example, the issues Frank raises: (1) 'Do judges make or discover law?'; (2) 'Are judicial decisions law or merely applications of law?'; (3) 'Do laws exist antecedent to judicial decisions?' (Frank 1963:159-160). From the viewpoint of a semiotics of law neither of the implied alternatives is the best possible solution. Rather, by emphasizing the multifunctionality of legal signs — the shifting roles of icon, index, and symbol in context — legal semiotics finds: first, judges' interpretations of encoded legal signs, through a discovery process, create new signs of judgment that, when encoded, act as new law; second, judicial decisions are neither absolute judgments nor applications of eternal laws, but are provisional, open-ended judgment signs that are (a) symbolic with reference to the context of the particular