Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to address some of the main issues of contemporary jurisprudential methodology by considering the contribution of Jules Coleman to this subject. After a description of Coleman's methodological approach and a clarification of its philosophical background, the paper focuses on some related problems, such as the relation between linguistic meaning and conceptual content, the nature of legal concepts, the different aspects of the normativity of content, and the revisability of conceptual truths.

In 1880, when Oliver Wendell Holmes (later to be a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) criticized the logical theology of law articulated by Christopher Columbus Langdell (the first Dean of Harvard Law School), neither Holmes nor Langdell was aware of the revolution in logic that had begun, the year before, with Frege's Begriffsschrift. But there is an important element of truth in Holmes's insistence that a legal system cannot be adequately understood as a system of axioms and corollaries; and (...) this element of truth is not obviated by the more powerful logical techniques that are now available. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, according to Peirce’s mature account of perception, we directly perceive generals, or "Thirds," in external reality which should be described as physical and not as mental. I argue against three other interpretations of the role of Thirdness in Peirce’s account: (I) we do not directly perceive Thirds, although they are involved in the interpretive and judgmental part of perception; (II) we directly perceive Thirds, but they are imposed on external objects by our minds; and (...) (III) we directly perceive Thirds in external objects, but external reality is comprised of the representations of an objective mind. I address questions about the role of the percept and the percipuum in his account, in what exact sense he thought that perception is interpretive, and how he thought it is even possible to directly perceive generals in the external world. (shrink)

The book offers a proposal on how to define truth in all its complexity, without reductionism, showing at the same time which questions a theory of truth has to answer and which questions, although related to truth, do not belong within the scope of such a theory. Just like any other theory, a theory of truth has its structure and limits. The semantic core of the position is that truth-ascriptions are pro-forms, i.e. natural language propositional variables. The book also offers (...) an explanation of the syntactic behaviour of truth-terms, and the pragmatic roles of truth-acts. The theory of truth we present is a technical proposal, relatively uncontaminated by radical philosophical discussion. It makes indeed philosophical points, but it is intended to be a conceptual analysis, as neutral as possible, of the aspects that may serve as a point of departure for more philosophically-laden destinations. Like the Fregean account of quantifiers, which is prior to and, to a large extent, independent of the metaphysical debate about existence and its forms, or the Kaplanian view on demonstratives, that is neutral regarding the debate about individuals and the possibilities we have to actually “reach” them in a referring act, we intend our proposal about truth to be a sophisticated and explicative setting that helps to situate other debates about truth accurately, far from the distorted and sometimes strongly ideological discussions that have turned the topic into a paradigm of philosophical impasse. (shrink)

An overview of a philosophical movement originating in the United States of America in the 19th century.

This article posits a pragmatist philosophy of history as exemplified in the work of British Philosopher F.C.S. Schiller (1864–1937). Part of this argument for a pragma-tist philosophy of history resides on pragmatism’s key notion of “experience” be-ing presented here as both related to human forces that are operant in history, and the particularly important “temporal” nature within the term, making it also in part “historical.” The goal is to more generally broaden scholarship in pragmatism as both containing important elements of (...) a unique and coherent philosophy of history, and to bring Schiller closer into the academic circle of the history of pragmatist thought. Available for download. (shrink)

This article argues that Durkheim’s founding insight – uniquely social phenomena – presents us with both a foundation for the discipline of sociology and the risk that the discipline will become isolated. This, we argue, has happened. Our contention is that the emergent social phenomena need to be understood in relation to, but not reduced to, their biological and psychological substrates. Similarly, there are a number of other characteristics, notably of self-organization, which are distinguishing properties of social phenomena but also (...) of quite different phenomena. The comparison is instructive. We therefore argue for an ecological approach to sociological theory, which has important relationships to the general theories and philosophy of ecology and biology. We explore a number of terminological and conceptual parallels that may inform our understanding of the relation of social theory to these and other disciplines. (shrink)

We explore the technical details and historical evolution of Charles Peirce's articulation of a truth table in 1893, against the background of his investigation into the truth-functional analysis of propositions involving implication. In 1997, John Shosky discovered, on the verso of a page of the typed transcript of Bertrand Russell's 1912 lecture on ?The Philosophy of Logical Atomism? truth table matrices. The matrix for negation is Russell's, alongside of which is the matrix for material implication in the hand of Ludwig (...) Wittgenstein. It is shown that an unpublished manuscript identified as composed by Peirce in 1893 includes a truth table matrix that is equivalent to the matrix for material implication discovered by John Shosky. An unpublished manuscript by Peirce identified as having been composed in 1883?1884 in connection with the composition of Peirce's ?On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation? that appeared in the American Journal of Mathematics in 1885 includes an example of an indirect truth table for the conditional. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to develop a critical and extended understanding of creative practices in organisation from a phenomenological point of view. To develop such an understanding of practice, this paper will first outline a phenomenological understanding of creative practice, understood particularly with Merleau-Ponty as an embodied and situated nexus of action. Subsequently, the paper will show the contribution of pragmatism to an interpretation of practice as an experience-based reality and will describe the significance of habits. After briefly (...) comparing common characteristics of both pro-experiential philosophies, some perspectives on a creative "inter-practice" and an inclusive "pheno-pragma-practice" will be explored. Furthermore, improvisation is discussed as a form and medium for the actual realisation of an embodied, situational inter-practice. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on creative pheno-pragmatic practices in organisation will be outlined. (shrink)