 However, these claims also permit a more modest interpretation of Dante’s self-justification. In the first place, Dante’s claim to authority by virtue of his exile from Florence suggests that the legitimacy of an illustrious vernacular is not simply rooted in a game of numbers—that is, the illustriousness of a vernacular is not simply a product of how many people use it in a given region of the world. Quite to the contrary, since the proper use of such a vernacular requires that a poet possesses both scientia et ingenium, those who are legitimate users of an illustrious vernacular are likely to be few in number, and the ways in which they ought to employ such a language are similarly constrained. Moreover, both Dante’s warnings about the problems of bias in our attitudes toward our own linguistic conventions as well as his point that the legitimacy of his own evaluation is rooted in his attention to reason rather than merely to the senses provides a hint that Dante regards the legitimacy of poetic employments of an illustrious vernacular as grounded in philosophy’s authoritativeness with respect to ethical and political matters.