 The problem faced in cases like Garner v Burr is an especially vivid reminder of a problem that philosophers of language have long been more or less aware of (see Aristotle’s discussion of the notion of ‘friendship’ in Eudemian Ethics VII, 2, 1236a 33). The context-dependence of the meaning of utterances requires an account of linguistic competence that relates it to other human capacities—capacities to judge the importance of context and to draw analogies. It would be a mistake in the philosophy of language to account for language in a way that divorces its mastery from other aspects of reason. That connection between the use of language and reason is also illustrated by the contentious nature of the use of language in law. Much work on pragmatics by philosophers of language has concerned the conditions for understanding an utterance; judicial disputes over language are a reminder that those conditions—even though they are conditions of intelligibility of communication—lend themselves to disagreement and to reasoned dispute over how an utterance is to be understood (see Carston 2013, for discussion of controversies over the application of conversational maxims). The special feature that distinguishes the legal use of language from ordinary conversation is not that participants in a legal system act strategically while participants in an ordinary conversation act cooperatively; the special feature is that in order to attain the ideal of the rule of law, legal systems need institutions and processes for resolution of the disputes about the effect of law-making uses of language that arise as a result of its context-dependence, and as a result of other pragmatic aspects of communication.