ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by sketching, very roughly and with the fewest possible strokes, a picture of the kind of unor half-articulated beliefs that underlie and give point and meaning to human action and intention. It attempts to connect with current concerns about conceptual change and commensurability in anthropology and elsewhere. The chapter suggests that although one can of course sometimes discern the intentions of any particular individual founder, one commits the "single-author" fallacy if one attempts to impute a unique or univocal intention to the founders as a group. It also suggests that the art of constitutional interpretation is fraught with dangers and difficulties at least as great, and possibly as intractable, as those facing any anthropologist. In Federalist 37 Madison remarks, "All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation".
