In this entry I will offer a survey of the contemporary debate on fic- tionalism, which is a distinctive anti-realist view about certain regions of discourse that are valued for their usefulness rather than their truth.

Quite often, for one or the other purpose, the fact (or phenomenon) that does not exist is presented to the society or individuals as the real, really existing although it (the fact or phenomenon) simply does not exist in the real life. And often the term “fiction” is used to describe such phenomena. Although fiction is considered an inseparable companion of a social life, the question arises what the actual (true) fiction is and whether the use of it in criminal (...) proceeding does not mean an intentional law maker’s (or the person’s applying the law) fraud, deceit directed towards the addressee of the applicable law. Fiction and its impact on criminal proceedings is analyzed in this article. Features, characterizing fiction are discussed here as well. (shrink)

Les travaux récents ont permis de rendre justice à la théorie du langage qu’a élaborée Bentham et d’expliquer les enjeux théoriques de son attachement aux mots. Il est donc désormais possible de s’attacher à comprendre les enjeux langagiers à l’oeuvre dans les différents champs de la pensée benthamienne, et plus particulièrement au sein de sa théorie générale du droit. Dès lors, son projet de Nomographie semble aller de soi. Nous nous attacherons à montrer dans quelle mesure ce texte entend tirer (...) les conséquences de l’ensemble des acquis théoriques de la philosophie benthamienne et plus précisément comment il permet de penser les relations entre langage et droit pour aboutir à la constitution du droit comme système de contrôle social. (shrink)

This volume collects selected papers delivered at the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, which was held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in July 2018. It includes papers dealing with the past, present, and future of utilitarianism – the theory that human happiness is the fundamental moral value – as well as on its applications to animal ethics, population ethics, and the future of humanity, among other topics.

It is commonly said that some standards, such as morality, are ‘normatively authoritative’ in a way that other standards, such as etiquette, are not; standards like etiquette are said to be ‘not really normative’. Skeptics deny the very possibility of normative authority, and take claims like ‘etiquette is not really normative’ to be either empty or confused. I offer a different route to defeat skeptics about authority: instead of focusing on what makes standards like morality special, we should focus on (...) what makes standards like etiquette ‘not really normative’. I defend a fictionalist theory on which etiquette is ‘not really normative’ in roughly the same way that Sherlock is ‘not really a detective’, and show that fictionalism about some normative standards helps us explain the possibility of normative authority. (shrink)

This article argues that Agamben’s conception of fiction is crucial for understanding his recent works. I suggest that the key to understanding Agamben conception of fiction is to be found in a few curious remarks at the end of Language and Death. These remarks explain why the distinctions between life and death, animal life and human life, bare life and political forms of life, the outlaw and the sovereign, and the norm and the exception that continue to preoccupy Agamben are (...) all fictions. After considering Agamben’s account of these fictions and their relation to the relevant passage in Language and Death, the article explores the ways Agamben thinks the fictions that govern human action and social life might be unworked. (shrink)

In terms of the distinction between relationalist and substantialist philosophies of science opened up by American pragmatist thinkers like Dewey and Bentley, Bentham’s social ontology is relationalist and anti-substantialist. When the ontology is combined with his emphasis on ordinary language as the basis of social reality, it is seen to have thematic connections to later developments in social science such as social constructionism, social phenomenology, ethnomethodology and, due to its intent to critically question-received fictions, to neo-Marxian and other concerns about (...) objectivation and reification. Also, by re-reading Bentham’s theory of fictions as a theory of vernacular language habits, it can be shown to have empirical relevance for the sociology of language. (shrink)

Ratio Juris, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 386-414, December 2021.

In institutional legal theory, norms and facts are reciprocally operating elements: an interplay in which meaning construction is closely connected with acting: the pragmatic understanding of legal language in terms of its uses. With the semiotic elements of institutional theory, extended by the notion of ‘semiotic groups’, an analytical framework can be constructed to analyze a case study on the shifts in the concept of war which have taken place since the 1945 UN Charter and in the aftermath of 9/11. (...) The semiotic aspects of the institutional approach can offer insight into the complexity of the processes of meaning attribution in the field of law and war. (shrink)

In this paper, I sketch out and assess two readings of Bentham's theory of meaning, one reductive (Section 2), the other quasi‐pragmatist (Section 3)—both implicating Bentham's ontological and epistemological views. I focus on the way these readings would understand Bentham's analyses of claims in moral and political discourse that rely on putatively normative notions such as obligations and rights, good and bad, and what ought to be the case. I conclude the paper by suggesting tentatively that the independent merits of (...) both readings could signal an irreconcilable tension at the heart of Bentham's thought (Section 4). (shrink)

En 1814, Jeremy Bentham entreprend la rédaction de Chrestomathia, qui expose le savoir qu'il est utile d'apprendre. Mais ce texte est plus généralement une organisation entière du savoir de son temps à partir d'une «théorie des fictions », qui est à la fois une réflexion sur les concepts et une critique des nomenclatures. L'article qui suit s'intéresse particulièrement à la cinquantaine de pages consacrées aux mathématiques dans un ouvrage qui porte sur toutes les sciences du début du XIXe siècle et (...) critique l' Encyclopédie de Diderot et D'Alembert. L'une des idées les plus originales développées par l'auteur et dont on trouvera un écho lointain chez Gaston Bachelard est celle d'un conflit entre les concepts et la façon dont ils sont désignés par les mots. Signifiés, signifiants et concepts dérivent les uns par rapport aux autres en des sens que nul ne peut contrôler, pas même les savants; ce qui rend l'éducation durablement difficile. (shrink)