Nowhere has H.L.A. Hart's influence on philosophical jurisprudence in the English-speaking world been greater than in the way its fundamental project and method are conceived by its practitioners. Disagreements abound, of course. Philosophers debate the extent to which jurisprudence can or should proceed without appeal to moral or other values. They disagree about which participant perspective—that of the judge, lawyer, citizen, or “bad man”—is primary and about what taking up the participant perspective commits the theorist to. However, virtually unchallenged is (...) the view that jurisprudence is fundamentally interpretive or “hermeneutic”; that it takes for its subject a certain kind of social practice, constituted by the behavior and understandings of its participants; that its task is to explain this practice and its relations to other important social practices; and that it can properly be explained only by taking full account of participant understandings. It is, perhaps, some measure of the hegemony of Hart's influence that Ronald Dworkin mounts his fundamental challenge to Hart's positivism squarely from within this jurisprudential orthodoxy. Dworkin may have exceeded the limits of the method as Hart conceived it, but, as Stephen Perry has argued, “the seeds of Dworkin's strong version of inter-pretivism were sown by Hart himself.”. (shrink)

Even to disagree, we need to understand each other. If I reject what you say without understanding you, we will only have the illusion of a disagreement. You will be asserting one thing and I will be denying another. Even to disagree, we need some agreement.

What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action. In this paper I want to defend the ancient - and common-sense - position that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation. The defense no doubt requires some redeployment, but not more or less complete abandonment of the position, as (...) urged by many recent writers. (shrink)