'videlicet': How did “it is permissible to see” semantically shift to signify “to wit, namely”?

[scherz0]

How did meaning 1 beneath semantically shift to 2? What semantic notions underlie them? [Etymonline]

[Bubulus]

Does it seem better if you reword "it is permissible to see" as "you can see"? Somehow I feel "you can see" > "namely" isn't that strange...

[scherz0]

Somehow I feel "you can see" > "namely" isn't that strange...

This semantic shift still feels bizarre to me. Can you please elaborate, like I am 5 years old?

[Linguaphile]

The book Quoting Speech in Early English by Colette Moore has a whole section about this word, but I think, also, that with some etymologies at some point you just have to accept that the logic may not always seem clear from the perspective of modern English usage. This may be one of those words.

But basically: videlicet was commonly used to introduce quotes, and the case study from the book mentioned above focuses on 13th century legal texts from England written in Latin with quoted English text. The quoted English text was introduced by the word videlicet.

The meaning of videlicet, therefore, from its literal Latin meaning 'one is permitted to see', to its meaning as it was borrowed into English, 'namely', suggests in the context of speech representation that it will be followed by the direct speech of the defendant. And this assumption is supported by the corresponding switch into the language of the utterance, which mimics the original words, suggesting that the text reproduces the utterance verbatim.

In this context it was primarily used in written text, so, perhaps this is why the word "see" is used; the reader would see it.

The legal register, while typically a very conservative register, seems to have had particular need for a quotative, even one that functioned as imprecisely as videlicet. The grammaticalized sense of the word in this register does not appear to have been influential enough to spread to other registers, perhaps because of the limited circulation and functionality of legal records. A genre-specific usage (particularly one specific to a written genre) would have been likely an insecure form, and in these records we see that the use of videlicet begins to give way to other methods of marking quotations brought in through other text types: the use of punctuation and italics. These supplanted the use of videlicet, and the word was used after this point only in its less-grammaticalized sense of 'namely'.

So it is basically suggesting that the word originally was used to introduce quoted text in writing, which could be seen, and when it was no longer needed for that purpose, it lost that original use and was retained (in English) only with the meaning of "namely". So to me it seems like the issue is not exactly its literal meaning "it is permissible to see, you can see [in the following text]" but rather its historical usage of introducing quotations for legal evidence, expanded to be used for introducing exemplifying details, for which in English we can say "namely".
I don't know if it helps makes the logic clearer or not, or even if it is accurate in terms of why the word really developed this way, but maybe it at least can add something to the discussion.