[full article, abstract in English; only abstract in Lithuanian] This paper proposes a new pragmatic interpretation of the Frege–Geach problem and presents a possible solution using a model of ascriptive legal language. The first section includes the definition of the Frege–Geach problem. In the second section, I analyze the content of Geach’s critical argument against prescriptivism in ethics. I discuss what Geach means by ascriptivism, why he mixes it with prescriptivism, and why a particular article by Herbert Hart became the (...) subject of criticism by Geach. The third section proposes a possible solution to the Frege–Geach problem based on the explication of the assertoric force of ascriptive legal utterances and the performativity of legal language. (shrink)

This article claims that legal time has excluded and submerged an important sense of time inside structured time. Structured time has two forms. Each form of structured time identifies a beginning to a legal order (droit, Recht) as a whole. The one form has focussed upon a critical date. The critical date is exemplified by a basic text, such as the Constitution, or the judicially identified date of settlement, sovereignty or territorial control of a territory by the state. The second (...) form of structured time has begun with the judicial recognition of a value such as the rule of law, the protection of minorities, equal treatment, or due process of law. With the two forms of structured time, jurists have proceeded to identify a binding law. Such a law has been considered a rule, principle, doctrine or other intelligible standard. Once structured legal time has thus begun, events of legal relevance have been represented by jurists in a distinct phase or period of time. Each such a distinct period is parsed through reference to its named, or labelled, starting point and the latter, in turn and ultimately, with reference to the beginning of the very constitutional order as a whole. Legal justification and the conceptual structures of justification are presumed to follow suit. The article argues, however, that another sense of time, excluded and submerged inside structured time, is experienced. An experienced event, manifested as a discrete incident in experiential time, opens to a condition of the possibility of the existence of law. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary debate about the nature of expertise often conflates having expertise with either the individual possession of competences or a certain role ascription. In contrast to this, the paper attempts to demonstrate how different dimensions of expertise ascription are inextricably interwoven. As a result, a balanced account of expertise will be proposed that more accurately determines the closer relationship between the expert’s dispositions, their manifestations and the expert’s function. This finally results in an advanced understanding of expertise that views (...) someone as an expert only if she is undefeatedly disposed to fulfill a contextually salient service function adequately at the moment of assessment. (shrink)

This paper poses a new challenge to control-based theories of moral responsibility. Control-based theories – as defended, for instance, by Aristotle and John Martin Fischer – hold that an agent is responsible for an action only if she acted voluntarily and knew what she was doing. However, this paper argues that there is a large class of cases of unreflective behavior of which the following is true: the persons involved did not have the kind of control required by control-based theories, (...) yet we intuitively take the persons involved to be morally responsible. (shrink)

The problem of act individuation is a debate about the identity conditions of human acts. The fundamental question about act individuation is: how do we distinguish between actions? Three views of act individuation have dominated the literature. First, Donald Davidson and G.E.M. Anscombe have argued that a number of different descriptions refer to a single act. Second, Alvin Goldman and Jaegwon Kim have argued that each description designates a distinct act. Finally, Irving Thalberg and Judith Jarvis Thomson have averred that (...) some acts are sequences of causally related events, which include both a primitive bodily action and some of its effects. All of these accounts have assumed that a simple invariantist account of act individuation captures how ordinary people distinguish between acts. For my dissertation, I devised an experiment to test the action theorists' assumptions. My data show that people's intuitions seem to depend on the valence of the consequences of the action under consideration. So, an invariantist account is not possible. In light of the empirical results, I argue that if we seek a folk account of act individuation, then that account should be able to explain the variability that seems to be present in people's intuitions about different cases. (shrink)

This paper traces the intellectual trajectories of the first stand-alone theories of action, understood as both axiologically neutral and quasi-scientific from a methodological point of view. I argue that the rise of action theory of this kind corresponds to a particular moment of dissatisfaction within Western thought, and as such, it tells us far more about the history of philosophy than the subject itself. I conclude by explaining why subsequent failures to provide an acceptable theory of action are not accidental. (...) On the contrary, such failures owe themselves probably to the fact that formulating a theory of action is neither propitious nor useful. Thus, the most valuable lesson we can learn from philosophical desires for a theory of action is that we should take co-action as the starting point in our normative investigations, rather than positing action simpliciter as a problem to solve. That is, we should move away from propounding a theory of action, and instead focus on a paradigm shift, whereby we move away from a representational, towards a co-actional, model of action. (shrink)

Speech and thought about what the law is commonly function in practical ways, to guide or assess behavior. These functions have often been seen as problematic for legal positivism in the tradition of H.L.A. Hart. One recent response is to advance an expressivist analysis of legal statements (Toh), which faces its own, familiar problems. This paper advances a rival, positivist-friendly account of legal statements which we call “quasi-expressivist”, explicitly modeled after Finlay’s metaethical theory of moral statements. This consists in a (...) descriptivist, “rule-relational” semantics combined with a pragmatic account of the expressive and practical functions of legal discourse. We argue that this approach is at least as well-equipped as expressivism to explain the motivational and prescriptive features of “internal” legal statements, as well as a fundamental kind of legal disagreement, while being better positioned to account for various “external” uses of the same language. We develop this theory in a Hartian framework, and in the final part of the paper argue (particularly against Toh’s expressivist interpretation) that Hart’s own views in The Concept of Law are best reconstructed along such quasi-expressivist lines. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in the (...) respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

Ricoeur defines attestation as the "assurance of being oneself acting and suffering" or as the "assurance - the credence and the trust - of existing in the mode of selfhood." In this dissertation I discuss the concept of attestation in Ricoeur's philosophy in relation to the main dimensions of the self: Capacities, personal identity, memory and otherness. I state that attestation is the key to the three dialectics of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self: The dialectic between reflection and analysis, the (...) dialectic between idem-identity and ipse-identity and the dialectic between oneself and other. In these three dialectics, attestation, as the assurance of being oneself acting and suffering, allows the self to appropriate its otherness: The otherness of its capacities, the otherness of its identity, the otherness of its body, of other people and of its conscience. In other words, the self gains the confidence of being a self through the confidence that the actions it performs and the words it says are its own actions and words; the confidence that the narratives it tells express its own identity; the confidence that the body is its own body; the confidence that the esteem of others mediates its own esteem and that the values that it embraces are its own values. This analysis is made in the first four chapters of this dissertation. In the fifth chapter I explore the relationship between attestation and recognition. Attestation is not only necessary to understand the self at a hermeneutical level, but at the same time attestation shows a main ontological trait of the self: The self is attestation in the sense that the self is the confidence of existing as a self, confidence that is gained by appropriating its otherness. Thus, the concept of attestation along with providing an understanding of the self through otherness shows us that to become a self we need to attest to our self by appropriating our otherness. Then, as a conclusion, we can state that attestation serves as a bridge between hermeneutics and ontology in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. (shrink)

In this article I argue for rule-based, non-monotonic theories of common law judicial reasoning and improve upon one such theory offered by Horty and Bench-Capon. The improvements reveal some of the interconnections between formal theories of judicial reasoning and traditional issues within jurisprudence regarding the notions of the ratio decidendi and obiter dicta. Though I do not purport to resolve the long-standing jurisprudential issues here, it is beneficial for theorists both of legal philosophy and formalizing legal reasoning to see where (...) the two projects interact. (shrink)

In response to critique by Godden and Walton, this essay delineates the role of moral motivation in the commitment structure of ordinary presumptive inferences. It defends the capacity of ordinary presumptions to support discursive structures within which everyday argumentation can address defeasible claims and enable alignments and realignments in probative obligations, i.e., burdens of proof.

This paper discusses the parameters of an arguer's duties on the "dialectical tier of argument appraisal." Argumentative burdens incurred in making proposals will be compared with probative obligations which may be taken on in advising. The burdens t ypically incurred in these two kinds of illocutionary acts are strikingly different; accordingly, the arguer's obligation to response to objections would be circumscribed differently depending on which speech acts initiates the dialogue. This claim has i mplications for how we delimit a "good (...) case" for deliberative propositions. It also casts light on "manifest rationality" and the role of rhetorical art in argumentation. (shrink)

This paper attempts to shed light on the dynamics of criminal adjudication. It starts by exploring some significant—and often ignored—similarities and dissimilarities between the practices and disciplines of, respectively, legal reasoning and fact finding. It then discusses the problem of defining the nature of these processes—legal reasoning, in particular—in terms of their being instances of practical or theoretical reasoning. Thus understood, the problem is shown to be distinct from two traditional questions of jurisprudence, namely whether law consists of facts and, (...) if so, whether these facts are social or moral. Two theses are proposed as solutions to the problem: 'in the majority of cases legal reasoning is theoretical', and 'when legal reasoning is practical it generally involves complex theoretical operations'. Finally, the paper shows how T1 and T2 can make sense of the phenomena presented at the outset. (shrink)

Languages involving modalities and languages involving vagueness have each been thoroughly studied. On the other hand, virtually nothing has been said about the interaction of modality and vagueness. This paper aims to start filling that gap. Section 1 is a discussion of various possible sources of vague modality. Section 2 puts forward a model theory for a quantified language with operators for modality and vagueness. The model theory is followed by a discussion of the resulting logic. In Section 3, the (...) framework will permit us to address a puzzle raised by Elizabeth Barnes and Robert Williams. (shrink)

In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...) of explanatory pluralism both within philosophy of science and psychiatry – namely moderate/temporary pluralism, anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, integrative pluralism and interactive pluralism. Next, I discuss the pros and cons of these different understandings of explanatory pluralism. Finally, I raise the question of how to implement or operationalize explanatory pluralism in scientific practice; how to structure the “genuine dialogue” or shape “the pluralistic attitude” Campaner is referring to. As tentative answers, I explore a question-based framework for explanatory pluralism as well as social-epistemological procedures for interaction among competing approaches and explanations. (shrink)

Like being able to drive a car, being autonomous is a socially attributed, claimed, and contested status. Normative debates about criteria for autonomy (and what autonomy entitles one to) are best understood, not as debates about what autonomy, at core, really is, but rather as debates about the relative merits of various possible packages of thresholds, entitlements, regulations, values, and institutions. Within different “regimes” of autonomy, different criteria for (degrees of) autonomy become authoritative. Neoliberal, solidaristic, and perfectionist regimes entail conflicting (...) understandings of what gets you autonomy and what autonomy gets you—for example, in relation to policies regarding physician-assisted suicide or financial support for senior citizens. In light of this, justifying a particular understanding of autonomy is inseparable from the task of arguing for the context-specific merits of a regime of autonomy as a whole and in relation to other ethical and political commitments. (shrink)

The applicability of Bayesian conditionalization in setting one’s posterior probability for a proposition, α, is limited to cases where the value of a corresponding prior probability, PPRI(α|∧E), is available, where ∧E represents one’s complete body of evidence. In order to extend probability updating to cases where the prior probabilities needed for Bayesian conditionalization are unavailable, I introduce an inference schema, defeasible conditionalization, which allows one to update one’s personal probability in a proposition by conditioning on a proposition that represents a (...) proper subset of one’s complete body of evidence. While defeasible conditionalization has wider applicability than standard Bayesian conditionalization (since it may be used when the value of a relevant prior probability, PPRI(α|∧E), is unavailable), there are circumstances under which some instances of defeasible conditionalization are unreasonable. To address this difficulty, I outline the conditions under which instances of defeasible conditionalization are defeated. To conclude the article, I suggest that the prescriptions of direct inference and statistical induction can be encoded within the proposed system of probability updating, by the selection of intuitively reasonable prior probabilities. (shrink)

In this paper, it is shown (1) that there are two schemes for argument from analogy that seem to be competitors but are not, (2) how one of them is based on a distinctive type of similarity premise, (3) how to analyze the notion of similarity using story schemes illustrated by some cases, (4) how arguments from precedent are based on arguments from analogy, and in many instances arguments from classification, and (5) that when similarity is defined by means of (...) episode schemes, we can get a clearer idea of how it integrates with the use of argument from classification and argument from precedent in case-based reasoning by using a dialogue structure. (shrink)

The paper is a critical discussion of Sneddon’s recent proposal to revive ascriptivism in philosophy of action. Despite his declarations, Sneddon fails in his central task of giving an account of the distinction between actions and mre happenings. His failure is due to three major problems. First, the account is based on a misconceived methodology of “type” necessary and “token” sufficient conditions. Second, the “type” necessary condition he proposed is so weak that the connection that obtains between action and responsibility (...) also obtains between action and lack of responsibility. Third, neither the idea of responsibility nor the idea of defeating conditions is elucidated sufficiently to play any role in understanding what it is to be an action. (shrink)

We contend that it is possible to argue reasonably for and against arguments from classifications and definitions, provided they are seen as defeasible (subject to exceptions and critical questioning). Arguments from classification of the most common sorts are shown to be based on defeasible reasoning of various kinds represented by patterns of logical reasoning called defeasible argumentation schemes. We show how such schemes can be identified with heuristics, or short-cut solutions to a problem. We examine a variety of arguments of (...) this sort, including argument from abductive classification, argument from causal classification, argument from analogy-based classification and arguments from classification based on generalizations. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

This paper argues that some traditional fallacies should be considered as reasonable arguments when used as part of a properly conducted dialog. It is shown that argumentation schemes, formal dialog models, and profiles of dialog are useful tools for studying properties of defeasible reasoning and fallacies. It is explained how defeasible reasoning of the most common sort can deteriorate into fallacious argumentation in some instances. Conditions are formulated that can be used as normative tools to judge whether a given defeasible (...) argument is fallacious or not. It is shown that three leading violations of proper dialog standards for defeasible reasoning necessary to see how fallacies work are: (a) improper failure to retract a commitment, (b) failure of openness to defeat, and (c) illicit reversal of burden of proof. (shrink)

The paper consists of three parts. In the first part five kinds of defeasibility are distinguished that is ontological, conceptual, epistemic, justification and logical defeasibility. In the second part it is argued that from these, justification defeat is the phenomenon that plays a role in legal reasoning. In the third part, the view is defended that non-monotonic logics are not necessary to model justification defeat, but that they are so to speak the natural way to model this phenomenon.

The narrative approach to identity has developed as a sophisticated philosophical response to the complexities and ambiguities of the human, lived situation, and is not – as has been naively suggested elsewhere – the imposition of a generic form of life or the attempt to imitate a fictional character. I argue that the narrative model of identity provides a more inclusive and exhaustive account of identity than the causal models employed by mainstream theorists of personal identity. Importantly for ethical subjectivity, (...) the narrative model gives a central and irreducible role to the first-person perspective. I will draw the connection between narrative identity and ethical subjectivity by way of an exposition of work by Paul Ricoeur and Marya Schechtman, and a brief consideration of Korsgaard’s work on practical identity and normative ethics. I argue that the first-person perspective – the reflective structure of human consciousness – arises from human embodiment, and therefore the model of identity required of embodied consciousness is more complex and irreducibly first-personal than that provided in a causal account. What is required is a self-constitution model of identity: a narrative model of identity. (shrink)

Jurisprudes today differ in their interpretations of H.L.A. Hart’s analysis of the semantics of internal legal statements. Drawing upon the philosophy of language and metaethics to reconstruct Hart’s view, they disagree as to whether Hart should be interpreted as an expressivist or quasi-expressivist. In this paper I propose a third reconstruction, under which Hart adopted an inferentialist analysis of the semantics of internal legal statements. In executing this reconstruction, I focus on Hart’s inaugural lecture, and utilize the theoretical apparatus of (...) Robert Brandom, a leading advocate of inferential role semantics, to bring Hart’s methodological pragmatist—and more specifically inferentialist—insight in that lecture to the fore. (shrink)

In this essay both the facts/values and facticity/normativity divides are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and with specific regard to the relationships between legal meaning and spatial scope of law’s experience. Through an examination of the inner and genetic projective significance of categorization, I will analyze the semantic dynamics of the descriptive parts comprising legal sentences in order to show the intermingling of factual and axiological/teleological categorizations in the unfolding of legal experience. Subsequently, I will emphasize the translational (...) and enactive cognitive disposition underlying the construction of the second premise of the so-called judiciary syllogism and thereby the untenability of the idea that ‘law makes its facts.’ Hence, I will try to bring to the fore the cultural pre-assumptions encapsulated in the positivistic and therefore also formalistic or analytical approaches to legal experience and the loss of their inner consistency when legal experience confronts the phases and major changes of global semiotics. Finally, I will strive to relativize the opposition between the positivist and non-positivistic theories of law in view of an understanding of legal experience focused not only, or at least not primarily, on what ‘law is’ but also on ‘how’ it unwinds through, and _in spite of_, environmental and semantic transformations. (shrink)

Vicarious responsibility is a notoriously puzzling notion in normative reasoning. In this article we will explore two fundamental issues, which we will call the “explication problem” and the “justification problem”. The former issue concerns how vicarious responsibility can plausibly be defined in terms of other normative concepts. The latter issue concerns how ascriptions of vicarious responsibility can be justified. We will address these two problems by combining ideas taken from legal theory and moral philosophy. Our analysis will emphasise the importance (...) of the voluntary involvement of the normative parties considered liable in a relation with other normative parties who causally contributed to a prohibited state-of-affairs. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I aim to develop and defend a novel, pragmatist approach to foundational questions about meaning, especially the meaning of deontic moral vocabulary. Drawing from expressivists and inferentialists, I argue that meaning is best explained by the various kinds of norms that govern the use of a vocabulary. Along with inferential norms, I argue we must extend our account to discursive norms that govern normative statuses required to felicitously utter certain speech-acts—norms of authority—and the transitions in normative statuses (...) affected by speech-acts—pragmatic norms. These structural discursive norms differentiate discursive practices and account for distinctive features such as objectivity and motivational import that some have and others lack. The structure exhibited by a practice is then explained in terms of its utility, making it possible to see how different discursive practices are answerable to the different needs and purposes of the discursive beings who use them. I call the resulting explanatory framework a pragmatic analysis of linguistic meaning (PALM). -/- Turning my attention to moral “ought,” I argue that the structural discursive norms of moral discourse differentiate it from other objective discourses, like empirical discourse, on the one hand, and from other normative discourses, like prudential discourse, on the other. Drawing on work in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, I complete the PALM with an account of moral discourse a meta-normative practice with a metacoordinative function. Its utility for the discursive beings who use it lies in its enabling them to remedy certain tensions and instabilities that arise in their other coordinative, normative practices in a way that minimizes the risk of domination by alpha-type freeriders, the fracturing of social groups, and individual defection from cooperative endeavors. -/- In the final two chapters, I leverage the account to defend a pragmatist-friendly notion of objectivity in terms of a structure of distributed epistemic authority according to which no claim within a practice is ultimately authoritative or immune from challenge and to reconcile this sense of objectivity with a persistent pressure toward a kind of relativism that restricts the standing to make moral claims to members of the relevant communities. (shrink)

Philosophical work on free will, contemporary as well as historical, is inevitably framed by the problem of free will and determinism. One of my goals in what follows is to give a feel for the main lines of that debate in philosophy today. I will also be outlining a particular perspective on free will. Many working philosophers consider themselves Compatibilists; the perspective outlined, building on a number of arguments in the recent literature, is a contemporary form of such a view. (...) It cannot, however, claim to be the contemporary philosophical perspective. There is no such thing. Against a background of the perennial problem of free will and determinism, through ongoing argument and debate, philosophers continue to try to work toward an understanding of precisely what it means for an action to be free. (shrink)

Nemonotónní logika vznikla za účelem systematicky zachytit tzv. zrušitelné uvažování, tj. typ každodenního uvažování, které vede jen k provizorně platným argumentům, jenž mohou být následně staženy s příchodem nových informací. Tím se ovšem nemonotónní logika dostává do ostrého kontrastu s klasickou logikou, která je monotónní, tj. žádné dodatečné premisy nemohou zrušit jednou již platné argumenty. To bylo pro mnohé dostatečným důvodem k tomu, aby nemonotónní logice upřeli status logiky. V tomto textu si ukážeme, že takový závěr je příliš unáhlený a (...) že nemonotónní logika má právo se nazývat logikou. (shrink)

This paper revisits the challenge of Berman and Hafner’s “missing link” paper on representing teleological structure in case-based legal reasoning. It is noted that this was mainly an ontological challenge to represent some of what made legal reasoning distinctive, which was given less attention than factual similarity in the dominant AI and Law paradigm, deriving from HYPO. The response to their paper is noted and briefly evaluated. A parallel is drawn to a new challenge to provide deep structure to the (...) legal context of textual meaning, drawing on the forthcoming work of two Constitutional law scholars who appear to place some faith in the ways of thinking that AI and Law has developed. (shrink)

There is an extensive body of philosophical, educational, and popular literature explaining Socratic pedagogy’s epistemological and educational ambitions. However, there is virtually no literature clarifying the relationship between Socratic method and doxastic responsibility. This article fills that gap in the literature by arguing that the Socratic method models many of the features of an ideally doxastically responsible agent. It ties a robust notion of doxastic responsibility to the Socratic method by showing how using defeaters to undermine participants’ knowledge claims can (...) facilitate responsible belief. It then argues that more robust notions of doxastic responsibility can be augmented by constructs found in the American Philosophical Association’s Delphi Report. Finally, it shows how considering challenges and modifying beliefs accordingly are objectives of the Socratic method and crucial elements of what it means to be a responsible believer. (shrink)

Realism has been a central object of attention among analytical philosophers for some decades. Starting from analytical philosophy, the return of realism has spread into other contemporary philosophical traditions and given birth to new trends in current discussions, as for example in the debates about “new realism.” Discussions about realism focused on linguistic meaning, epistemology, metaphysics, theory of action and ethics. The implications for politics of discussion about realism in action theory and in ethics, however, are not much discussed.

The rule that a patient should give a free, fully-informed consent to any therapeutic intervention is traditionally thought to express merely a right of the patient against the physician, and a duty of the physician towards the patient. On this view, the patient may waive that right with impugnity, a fact sometimes expressed in the notion of a right not to know. This paper argues that the rule also expresses a duty of the patient towards the physician and a right (...) of the physician against the patient. The argument turns, first, on the truism that a physician has no obligation to commit a battery, or unauthorized touching, and, second, on the thesis that a patient necessarily cannot consent to something that is unknown to him. The conclusion is drawn that a patient is not free to receive treatment voluntarily without knowledgeably authorizing it. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Abstract. The paper begins by challenging Hart's argument aimed to show that sanctions are not part of the concept of law. It shows that in the "minimal" legal system as understood by Hart, sanctions may be required for keeping the legal system efficacious. I then draw a methodological conclusion from this argument, which challenges the view of Hart (and his followers) that legal philosophy should aim at discovering some general, politically neutral, conceptual truths about law. Instead, the aim should be (...) to discover the values because of which certain things in the world are classified as law and others as non-law. Focusing on those would give us a more insight to the roles law plays in society, as well as more illuminating answers to traditional jurisprudential questions like the status of law in evil regimes. (shrink)

Illocutionary force and semantic content are widely held to occupy utterly different categories in at least two ways: Any expression serving as an indicator of illocutionary force must be without semantic content, and no such expression can embed. A refined account of the force/content distinction is offered here that does the explanatory work that the standard distinction does, while, in accounting for the behavior of a range of parenthetical expressions, shows neither nor to be compulsory. The refined account also motivates (...) a development of the "scorekeeping model" of conversation, helps to isolate a distinction between illocutionary force and illocutionary commitment, and reveals one precise respect in which meaning is only explicable in terms of use. (shrink)

Although much ink has been spilled on different aspects of legal concepts, the approach based on the developments of cognitive science is a still neglected area of study. The “mental” and cognitive aspect of these concepts, i.e., their features as mental constructs and cognitive tools, especially in the light of the developments of the cognitive sciences, is discussed quite rarely. The argument made by this paper is that legal concepts are best understood as mental representations. The piece explains what mental (...) representations are and why this view matters. The explanation of legal concepts, understood as mental representations is one of three levels of explanation within legal philosophy, but—as will be argued—it is the most fundamental level. This paper analyzes the consequences of such understanding of concepts used in the field of legal philosophy. Special emphasis is put on the current debate on the analogical or amodal nature of concepts. (shrink)