 On that view, the content of the law of a community depends on a conventional way of recognizing legal rules. But if members of the community share a way of recognizing their law, how can they engage in the deep disputes about the law that we are all so familiar with? Dworkin made that question into a focus of jurisprudential debate. And he framed the question as an objection to a misguided view of language, and of the relation between law and language. He began his book Law’s Empire (Dworkin 1986b) by contending that legal theorists like Hart cannot explain theoretical disagreement in legal practice, because they think that lawyers share uncontroversial tests (tests which Dworkin termed ‘criteria’) for the truth of propositions of law. The ‘semantic sting’ involves the misconception that the language of the law can be meaningful only if lawyers share such criteria. It is fatal to a legal theory, because it leads the theorist to think that people cannot have any deep (or ‘substantive’ or ‘genuine’) disagreement about the law. They can only disagree (1) about empirical questions such as what words were used in a statute, or (2) about how to resolve penumbral cases, or (3) about whether the law should be changed. If you suffer from the semantic sting, you will conclude that disagreeing about the criteria for application of the language of the law would be like using the same words with different meanings. People who disagree in that way are only talking past each other. Here is how Dworkin set out the views of theorists who suffer from the semantic sting: