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)

Epistemic and practical interests are often in conflict. This also occurs in institutional settings such as the legal one. Rule 407 of the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence is an example of that because it sacrifices some epistemic interests in favour of practical ones. It is the rule on subsequent remedial measures (SRM), which is mainly designed to answer a practical concern (reducing accidents) instead of the epistemic one of getting some evidence to find out whether the defendant was negligent (...) or whether there was a defect in a product. Some commentators and courts think that the rationale of the rule is more complex and deserves a more careful discussion, as this paper shows. Additionally, this paper discusses a modification proposal (from categorical ban of SRM evidence to case‐by‐case decision) and develops some theoretical considerations, in the spirit of philosophical pragmatism, on the best way to conceptualize the problem addressed. The idea is to see such conflicts as conflicts of goals and to explain them in terms of the incompatible desires that we happen to have. (shrink)

The article addresses three theses on judgment in general and legal judgment in particular, starting from Peirce’s and Dewey’s claims about them. The first thesis, ontological, concerns the content of an act of judgment and says that judgment is about an object instantiating a property (not about a property instantiated by an object). The second, alethic, concerns the relation between judgment and truth and says that judgment is the attribution of a truth value to a proposition. The third, genetic, deals (...) with the moments of judgment claiming it is a process susceptible of being articulated in such moments. Its fundamental moments are 1) hypothesis, 2) inquiry, 3) result. The article claims that the three theses interconnect and hold for both judgment in general and legal judgment, given that the latter is a model of the former; so a complex conception of judgment is articulated, discussing also its relations with assertion and inference. (shrink)

Arguably, a theory of assertion should be able to provide (i) a definition of assertion, and (ii) a set of conditions for an assertion to be appropriate. This paper reviews two strands of theories that have attempted to meet this challenge. Commitment-based accounts à la Peirce define assertion in terms of commitment to the truth of the proposition. Restriction-based accounts à la Williamson define assertion in terms of the conditions for its appropriate performance. After assessing the suitability of these projects (...) to meet the desiderata of a theory of assertion, I argue that a speech act theoretic account à la Searle is more suitable for this purpose: it integrates the core intuitions of both restriction-based and commitment-based accounts while avoiding their respective problems, and has the further advantage of determining how assertion fits into a more general theory of illocutionary acts. (shrink)