It is crucial not to conflate a provision’s linguistic meaning with its contribution to the content of the law. It might turn out that a statute’s contribution is constituted by its linguistic meaning (or, more precisely, by a specific kind of linguistic meaning), but this is a highly controversial claim about how the content of the law is determined. If, in addressing the preliminary question of what legal interpretation seeks, we simply conflate a statute’s contribution with its linguistic meaning, then, among other mistakes, we miss the need for a substantive argument for that claim.