A working bibliography.

The heap no single grain makes — and the theories that try to live with it.  SEP: Vagueness · SEP: Sorites

1. Eubulides of Miletus, the sorites paradox (4th c. BCE)The origin: one grain is not a heap, and a grain never makes the difference.
2. Max Black, “Vagueness: An Exercise in Logical Analysis” (1937)An early analytic attempt to take vagueness seriously rather than legislate it away.
3. Kit Fine, “Vagueness, Truth and Logic” (1975, Synthese)The locus classicus of supervaluationism: truth as super-truth across precisifications.
4. Crispin Wright, “On the Coherence of Vague Predicates” (1975, Synthese)Tolerance principles and why they make the sorites bite.
5. Timothy Williamson, Vagueness (1994, Routledge)Epistemicism: there is a sharp boundary; we are simply unable to know it.
6. Rosanna Keefe & Peter Smith (eds), Vagueness: A Reader (1996, MIT Press)The standard anthology; the obvious place to begin.
7. Rosanna Keefe, Theories of Vagueness (2000, Cambridge UP)A survey and a sustained defence of supervaluationism.
8. Roy Sorensen, Vagueness and Contradiction (2001, Oxford UP)Epistemicism pressed to its stranger and more honest conclusions.
9. Delia Graff Fara, “Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of Vagueness” (2000)Contextualism: borderline judgements shift with our interests and attention.
10. Stewart Shapiro, Vagueness in Context (2006, Oxford UP)An open-texture, conversational-record account of how the line gets drawn.
11. Diana Raffman, Unruly Words: A Study of Vague Language (2014, Oxford UP)A psychologically-informed, multi-range theory of competent vague usage.

The same penumbra, now with a verdict attached.  SEP: The Nature of Law

1. H. L. A. Hart, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals” (1958, Harvard Law Review)Introduces the “no vehicles in the park” case and the core/penumbra picture.
2. Lon L. Fuller, “Positivism and Fidelity to Law — A Reply to Professor Hart” (1958, Harvard Law Review)The reply: meaning answers to purpose, not just to the word.
3. H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (1961, Oxford UP)The open texture of law (ch. VII): rules with settled cores and doubtful edges.
4. Brian Bix, Law, Language, and Legal Determinacy (1993, Oxford UP)What Hart did and did not mean by open texture; how much law is determinate.
5. Jeremy Waldron, “Vagueness in Law and Language: Some Philosophical Issues” (1994, California Law Review)Whether vague legislation is compatible with the rule of law.
6. Timothy A. O. Endicott, Vagueness in Law (2000, Oxford UP)The canonical book: vagueness is essential to law, not a flaw in drafting.
7. Andrei Marmor, The Language of Law (2014, Oxford UP)Pragmatics, assertion, and strategic speech in the law’s peculiar context.

Meaning as a place in the game of giving and asking for reasons.

1. Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956; repr. Harvard UP, 1997)The myth of the given, and the “logical space of reasons.”
2. Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit (1994, Harvard UP)The systematic inferentialism: scorekeeping on commitments and entitlements.
3. Robert B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (2000, Harvard UP)The short way in — start here before the “big green book.”
4. Robert B. Brandom, Between Saying and Doing (2008, Oxford UP)Analytic pragmatism: the practices one must engage in to deploy a vocabulary.
5. Michael Dummett, The Seas of Language (1993, Oxford UP)Meaning, use, and what a theory of meaning is even for.

Saying as doing; meaning as more than what is said.  SEP: Speech Acts · SEP: Pragmatics

1. P. F. Strawson, “On Referring” (1950, Mind)Against Russell: referring is something speakers do, not sentences.
2. J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses” (1956, Proc. Aristotelian Society)The manifesto of ordinary-language method: the dictionary as a field guide.
3. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962, Oxford UP)Performatives, and the locution / illocution / perlocution distinction.
4. John R. Searle, Speech Acts (1969, Cambridge UP)Constitutive rules and the systematic theory of illocutionary force.
5. H. P. Grice, “Logic and Conversation” (1975)The cooperative principle, the maxims, and conversational implicature.
6. John R. Searle, Expression and Meaning (1979, Cambridge UP)A taxonomy of illocutionary acts; indirect speech acts.
7. Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986, Blackwell)Inference and relevance as the engine of comprehension.
8. H. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (1989, Harvard UP)The collected papers; meaning, implicature, and intention together.

Use, language-games, forms of life — and what it is to follow a rule.  SEP: Wittgenstein

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921; Eng. 1922)The early picture theory, and the limits of what can be said.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953, Blackwell)Meaning as use; language-games; the rule-following and private-language remarks.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (1969, Blackwell)Hinge propositions: the riverbed on which doubt and inquiry run.
4. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (1979, Oxford UP)Criteria, skepticism, and the ordinary as a philosophical achievement.
5. Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982, Harvard UP)“Kripkenstein”: the sceptical paradox about meaning and the communal solution.
6. John McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule” (1984, Synthese)Between rampant Platonism and mere regularity: rules and practices.
7. Charles Travis, The Uses of Sense (1989, Oxford UP)Occasion-sensitivity: the same words say different things on different occasions.

The older problems the rest of this list is still answering.

1. Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference” [Über Sinn und Bedeutung] (1892)The distinction the whole field is built on: Sinn vs. Bedeutung.
2. Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting” (1905, Mind)The theory of descriptions; “the present King of France.”
3. W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951, Philosophical Review)Against the analytic/synthetic distinction; meaning holism.
4. W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (1960, MIT Press)The indeterminacy of translation; “gavagai.”
5. David Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (1969, Harvard UP)Language as convention solving recurrent coordination problems.
6. Donald Davidson, “Truth and Meaning” (1967, Synthese)A Tarski-style truth theory as a theory of meaning.
7. Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975)Twin Earth and externalism: “meanings just ain’t in the head.”
8. Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (1980, Harvard UP)Rigid designation and the causal-historical picture of reference.
9. David Kaplan, “Demonstratives” (1989)Character vs. content; the logic of indexicals.
10. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984, Oxford UP)Radical interpretation and the principle of charity.

Where the two trainings meet, in roughly the last fifteen years.

1. Andrei Marmor & Scott Soames (eds), Philosophical Foundations of Language in the Law (2011, Oxford UP)The agenda-setting collection for analytic philosophy of legal language.
2. Lawrence M. Solan, The Language of Judges (1993, Univ. of Chicago Press)A linguist reads judicial reasoning about words.
3. Brian G. Slocum, Ordinary Meaning (2015, Univ. of Chicago Press)What “ordinary meaning” could responsibly mean as an interpretive standard.
4. Thomas R. Lee & Stephen C. Mouritsen, “Judging Ordinary Meaning” (2018, Yale Law Journal)Corpus linguistics enters statutory and constitutional interpretation.
5. Frederick Schauer, “On the Open Texture of Law” (2013, Grazer Philosophische Studien)Re-examining Hart’s borrowed term and what it can still bear.
6. Scott Soames, “Interpreting Legal Texts” (2009, Philosophical Essays I)What is, and is not, special about meaning in the law.