In this study I analyse the performance of a democratic decision-making rule: the weighted majority rule. It assigns to each voter a number of votes that is proportional to her stakes in the decision. It has been shown that, for collective decisions with two options, the weighted majority rule in combination with self-interested voters maximises the common good when the latter is understood in terms of either the sum-total or prioritarian sum of the voters’ well-being. The (...) main result of my study is that this argument for the weighted majority rule — that it maximises the common good — can be improved along the following three main lines. (1) The argument can be adapted to other criteria of the common good, such as sufficientarian, maximin, leximin or non-welfarist criteria. I propose a generic argument for the collective optimality of the weighted majority rule that works for all of these criteria. (2) The assumption of self-interested voters can be relaxed. First, common-interest voters can be accommodated. Second, even if voters are less than fully competent in judging their self-interest or the common interest, the weighted majority rule is weakly collectively optimal, that is, it almost certainly maximises the common good given large numbers of voters. Third, even for smaller groups of voters, the weighted majority rule still has some attractive features. (3) The scope of the argument can be extended to decisions with more than two options. I state the conditions under which the weighted majority rule maximises the common good even in multi-option contexts. I also analyse the possibility and the detrimental effects of strategic voting. Furthermore, I argue that self-interested voters have reason to accept the weighted majority rule. (shrink)

In the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that for a linguistic expression to have a meaning is for it to be governed by a rule of use. In other words, it was widely believed that meanings are to be identified with use-conditions. However, as things stand, this idea is widely taken to be vague and mysterious, inconsistent with “truth-conditional semantics”, and subject to the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper I reinvigorate (...) the ideas that meaningfulness is a matter of being governed by rules of use and that meanings are best thought of in terms of use-conditions. I will do this by sketching the Rule-Governance view of the nature of linguistic meaningfulness, showing that the view isn’t by itself subject to the two problems, and explain why the idea has had a lasting appeal to philosophers from Strawson to Kaplan and why we should find it continually attractive. (shrink)

What are rules? In this paper I develop a view of regulative rules which takes them to be a distinctive normative kind occupying a middle ground between orders and normative truths. The paradigmatic cases of regulative rules that I’m interested in are social rules like rules of etiquette and legal rules like traffic rules. On the view I’ll propose, a rule is a general normative content that is in force due to human activity: enactment by an authority or acceptance (...) by a community. Rules are unlike orders in being not necessarily communicative, not an expression’s of the giver’s will, not evaluable for sincerity, and in that they have propositional content. And they’re unlike normative truths in that they’re themselves not even truth-evaluable (though their contents are). This is because rules qua things that are in force are not like constatives which have a mind to world direction of fit, but more like performatives. Furthermore, they differ from normative truths in that their normativity is isolated from their background justification and is therefore not dependent on contributory notions like reasons coming together in a weighing explanation. As such, they occupy a middle ground between orders and normative truths, much like in H. L. A. Hart’s opinion law occupies a middle ground between “coercion” and “morality” (Hart 1961/1994). I also illustrate the virtues of this understanding of rules by showing how proper appreciation of how they differ from normative truths helps us defuse a common objection to Hart’s practice theory of rules. (shrink)

In the theory of meaning, it is common to contrast truth-conditional theories of meaning with theories which identify the meaning of an expression with its use. One rather exact version of the somewhat vague use-theoretic picture is the view that the standard rules of inference determine the meanings of logical constants. Often this idea also functions as a paradigm for more general use-theoretic approaches to meaning. In particular, the idea plays a key role in the anti-realist program of Dummett (...) and his followers. In the theory of truth, a key distinction now is made between substantial theories and minimalist or deflationist views. According to the former, truth is a genuine substantial property of the truth-bearers, whereas according to the latter, truth does not have any deeper essence, but all that can be said about truth is contained in T-sentences (sentences having the form: ‘P’ is true if and only if P). There is no necessary analytic connection between the above theories of meaning and truth, but they have nevertheless some connections. Realists often favour some kind of truth-conditional theory of meaning and a substantial theory of truth (in particular, the correspondence theory). Minimalists and deflationists on truth characteristically advocate the use theory of meaning (e.g. Horwich). Semantical anti-realism (e.g. Dummett, Prawitz) forms an interesting middle case: its starting point is the use theory of meaning, but it usually accepts a substantial view on truth, namely that truth is to be equated with verifiability or warranted assertability. When truth is so understood, it is also possible to accept the idea that meaning is closely related to truth-conditions, and hence the conflict between use theories and truth-conditional theories in a sense disappears in this view. (shrink)

The paper analyses the role played by the concept of ‘common ground’ in argumentation theories. If a common agreement on all the rules of a discursive exchange is required, either at the beginning or at the end of an argumentative practice, then no violation of the rules is possible. The paper suggests an alternative understanding of ‘common ground’ as something that can change during the development of the argumentative practice, and in particular something that can change without (...) the practice being stopped, just as one sometimes violates the rule of a game without stopping playing. The analysis of some historical examples shows that the violation of rules sometimes leads to a consensual change of a set of beliefs and values. The argumentative rationality thus needs to be reconsidered in the light of the analysis of the conditions under which it would be legitimate to change the rules of an argumentative practice: ‘common ground’ and the right to disagreement, even radical or violent, could then be defended as essential components of argumentative rationality. (shrink)

[EDIT: This book will be published open access. Check back around April 2024 to access the entire book.] One central aim of science is to provide explanations of natural phenomena. What role(s) does mathematics play in achieving this aim? How does mathematics contribute to the explanatory power of science? Rules to Infinity defends the thesis, common though perhaps inchoate among many members of the Vienna Circle, that mathematics contributes to the explanatory power of science by expressing conceptual rules, rules (...) which allow the transformation of empirical descriptions. Mathematics should not be thought of as describing, in any substantive sense, an abstract realm of eternal mathematical objects, as traditional platonists have thought. In Rules to Infinity, this view, which I call mathematical normativism, is updated with contemporary philosophical tools, and it is argued that normativism is compatible with mainstream semantic theory. This allows the normativist to accept that there are mathematical truths, while resisting the platonistic idea that there exist abstract mathematical objects that explain such truths. Furthermore, Rules to Infinity defends a particular account of the distinction between scientific explanations that are in some sense distinctively mathematical – those that explain natural phenomena in some uniquely mathematical way – and those that are only standardly mathematical, and it lays out desiderata for any account of this distinction. Normativism is compared with other prominent views in the philosophy of mathematics such as neo-Fregeanism, fictionalism, conventionalism, and structuralism. Rules to Infinity serves as an entry point into debates at the forefront of philosophy of science and mathematics, and it defends novel positions in these debates. (shrink)

The paper presents a phenomenological approach to recent debates in the philosophy of language about rule-following and the normativity of meaning, a debate that can be traced to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations but that was given new life with Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Taking a cue from Hannah Ginsborg’s recent work on “primitive normativity,” I use some of Husserl’s own comments about meaning and the status of rules to sketch a solution to Kripke’s rule-following (...) paradox by appealing to a kind of normativity at the level of perception and intersubjective embodiment. This level of normativity arises, like Ginsborg’s, via a primitive kind of judgment that does not presuppose linguistic or conceptual mastery. Unlike for Ginsborg, however, for Husserl this level should still be understood in terms of meaning—just not in the standard linguistic or conceptual senses prominent in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition in which the rule-following debates have occurred. My interpretation thus also demonstrates how Husserl’s account bypasses certain presuppositions about meaning common in the period of the linguistic turn—presuppositions also questioned, in different ways, by Wittgenstein, by Kripke, and by Ginsborg. (shrink)

The Golden Rule, most commonly expressed in the form "do to others what you would have them do to you", has attracted criticism for failing to provide practical guidance in case of moral disagreement and for being susceptible to irrational outcomes. I argue that the alleged limitations are not a defect but just what makes the Golden Rule an effective tool of socio-ontological transformation towards ideal agency.

How can people function appropriately and respond normatively in social contexts even if they are not aware of rules governing these contexts? John Searle has rightly criticized a popular way out of this problem by simply asserting that they follow them unconsciously. His alternative explanation is based on his notion of a preintentional, nonrepresentational background. In this paper I criticize this explanation and the underlying account of the background and suggest an alternative explanation of the normativity of elementary social practices (...) and of the background itself. I propose to think of the background as being intentional, but nonconceptual, and of the basic normativity or proto-normativity as being instituted through common sensory-motor-emotional schemata established in the joint interactions of groups. The paper concludes with some reflections on what role this level of collective intentionality and the notion of the background can play in a layered account of the social mind and the ontology of the social world. (shrink)

In “Is semantics possible?” Putnam connected two themes: the very possibility of semantics (as opposed to formal model theory) for natural languages and the proper semantic treatment of common nouns. Putnam observed that abstract semantic accounts are modeled on formal languages model theory: the substantial contribution is rules for logical connectives (given outside the models), whereas the lexicon (individual constants and predicates) is treated merely schematically by the models. This schematic treatment may be all that is needed for an (...) account of validity in a formal setting, but it does not help to understand how proper and common nouns function in reality (not in models). Putnam then initiated the empirical study of such nouns to indicate, (i), that the popular Frege-Carnap account of them as (“disguised” compound) predicates is empirically incorrect, and, (ii), that they offer a new paradigm for a naturalistic semantics of natural languages. We take Putnam’s program a couple of steps further. First, we investigate the semantics of common nouns and argue that they refer (to kinds), rather than apply by satisfaction/truth to a designation/denotation. Second, we point to general results about semantics as a theory whose fulcrum is the reference relation rather than satisfaction in models and validity across them. (shrink)

The article evaluates the Domain Postulate of the Classical Model of Science and the related Aristotelian prohibition rule on kind-crossing as interpretative tools in the history of the development of mathematics into a general science of quantities. Special reference is made to Proclus’ commentary to Euclid’s first book of Elements , to the sixteenth century translations of Euclid’s work into Latin and to the works of Stevin, Wallis, Viète and Descartes. The prohibition rule on kind-crossing formulated by Aristotle (...) in Posterior analytics is used to distinguish between conceptions that share the same name but are substantively different: for example the search for a broader genus including all mathematical objects; the search for a common character of different species of mathematical objects; and the effort to treat magnitudes as numbers. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the sixth century ’Rule of St. Benedict’, and argue that the authority structure of Benedictine communities as described in that document satisfies well-known principles of authority defended by Joseph Raz. This should lead us to doubt the common assumption that premodern models of authority violate the modern ideal of the autonomy of the self. I suggest that what distinguishes modern liberal authority from Benedictine authority is not the principles that justify it, but rather (...) the first-order beliefs for the sake of which authority is sought by the individual, and the degree of trust between the authority and the subject. (shrink)

We argue that common knowledge, of the kind used in reasoning in law and computing is best analyzed using a dialogue model of argumentation (Walton & Krabbe 1995). In this model, implicit premises resting on common knowledge are analyzed as endoxa or widely accepted opinions and generalizations (Tardini 2005). We argue that, in this sense, common knowledge is not really knowledge of the kind represent by belief and/or knowledge of the epistemic kind studied in current epistemology. This (...) paper takes a different approach, defining it in relation to a common commitment store of two participants in a rule-governed dialogue in which two parties engage in rational argumentation (Jackson & Jacobs 1980; van Eemeren & Grootendorst 2004). A theme of the paper is how arguments containing common knowledge premises can be studied with the help of argumentation schemes for arguments from generally accepted opinion and expert opinion. It is argued that common knowledge is a species of provi- sional acceptance of a premise that is not in dispute at a given point in a dia- logue, but may later be defeated as the discussion proceeds . (shrink)

In a recent paper (Bird 2001), Alexander Bird argues that the law that common salt dissolves in water is metaphysically necessary - and he does so without presupposing dispositionalism about properties. If his argument were sound, it would thus show that at least one law of nature is meta- physically necessary, and it would do so without illicitly presupposing a position (dispositionalism) that is already committed to a necessitarian view of laws. I shall argue that Bird's argument is unsuccesful.

This paper examines theories of first person authority proposed by Dorit Bar-On (2004), Crispin Wright (1989a) and Sydney Shoemaker (1988). What all three accounts have in common is that they attempt to explain first person authority by reference to the way our language works. Bar-On claims that in our language self-ascriptions of mental states are regarded as expressive of those states; Wright says that in our language such self-ascriptions are treated as true by default; and Shoemaker suggests that they (...) might arise from our capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances. I argue that Bar-On’s expressivism and Wright’s constitutive theory suffer from a similar problem: They fail to explain how it is possible for us to instantiate the language structures that supposedly bring about first person authority. Shoemaker’s account does not suffer from this problem. But it is unclear whether the capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances really yields self-knowledge. Also, it might be that self-knowledge explains why we have this capacity rather than vice versa. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge the commonly held view that Plato acknowledges and accepts the possibility of akrasia in the Laws. I offer a new interpretation of the image of the divine puppet in Book 1 - the passage often read as an account of akratic action -- and I show that it is not intended as an illustration of akrasia at all. Rather, it provides the moral psychological background for the text by illustrating a broader notion of self-rule (...) as a virtuous condition of the soul (and lack of self-rule as a vicious condition). I examine key discussions in the Laws in order to show how Plato makes use of this broader notion of self-rule throughout the dialogue, and I argue that nothing Plato says in the Laws commits him to the possibility of akrasia. One significant consequence of my interpretation of the puppet passage is that it avoids the need to posit developmentalism in Plato's late views about the embodied human soul, as some recent commentators have done: the moral psychology of the Laws, on my reading, is not incompatible with the Republic's tripartite theory of the soul. (shrink)

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal evidence (...) from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

This article takes up the question of whether legal rules are reasons for action. They are commonly regarded in this way, yet are legal rules reasons for action themselves (the reflexivity thesis) or are they instead merely statements of other reasons that we may already have (the paraphrastic thesis)? I argue for a version of the paraphrastic thesis. In doing so, considerable attention is given to the neglected but important puzzle of the opaqueness of rules, which arises out of what (...) some regard as the gap between the evaluative grounds of legal rules and what makes them into reasons for action. After examining an important articulation of the puzzle in the work of Joseph Raz, I argue that the reflexivity thesis is (i) undermined by certain features of rule making and (ii) defeated by the principle of presumptive sufficiency. The result is that it is possible for legal rules to be paraphrastic statements of reasons but, conversely, impossible for them to be reasons in themselves. (shrink)

When faced with a rule that they take to be true, and a recalcitrant example, people are apt to say: “The exception proves the rule”. When pressed on what they mean by this though, things are often less than clear. A common response is to dredge up some once-heard etymology: ‘proves’ here, it is often said, means ‘tests’. But this response—its frequent appearance even in some reference works notwithstanding1—makes no sense of the way in which the expression (...) is used. To insist that the exception proves the rule is to insist that whilst this is an exception, the rule still stands; and furthermore, that, rather than undermining the rule, the exception serves to confirm it. This second claim may seem paradoxical, but it should not, once it is realized that what does the confirming is not the exception itself, but rather the fact that we judge it to be an exception; and that what is confirmed is not the rule itself, but rather the fact that we judge it to be a rule. To treat something as an exception is not to treat it as a counterexample that refutes the existence of the rule. Rather it is to treat it as special, and so to concede the rule from which it is excepted. The point comes clearly in the original (probably 17th Century) Latin form: Exceptio probat (figit2) regulam in casibus non exceptis. Exception (i.e. the act of excepting) proves (establishes) the rule in the cases not excepted. Clearly this form of reasoning cannot apply when the rule that we are considering has the form of a simple universal generalization. Here there can be no exceptions, only counterexamples. So what we need, and what will be developed.. (shrink)

The Golden Rule is (roughly) as follows: treat others as you would have others treat you. Philosophical reactions to it vary; it has both supporters and detractors. In any case, almost nobody who things critically about morality takes the literal version of the Golden Rule seriously, since there are just too many problems with it. To demonstrate this, I will look at a literal version of the Golden Rule espoused by John C. Maxwell, a well-known and influential (...) motivational speaker, and briefly discuss some of the obvious problems that it faces. I will then examine a more sophisticated version of the Golden Rule espoused by philosopher Harry Gensler. While able to overcome some of the problems of the literal Golden Rule, Gensler's version nevertheless shares a common difficulty with it: in both cases, the moral agent is asked to imagine themselves in the place of another. Maxwell things this is easily done, and Gensler asks for vividness and accuracy in this act of imagination. I wish to show that any version of the Golden Rule that takes seriously the need to imagine oneself in the place of another is to ask one to do the impossible, so any versions of the Golden Rule that require this should be rejected. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper develops and advocates a rule for assigning self-locating credences in quantum branching scenarios, called Indexed Branch-Counting. It is argued that Indexed Branch-Counting can be justified on both accuracy-theoretic grounds and on the grounds that it satisfies a requirement of exchangeability for probability assignments. Since Indexed Branch-Counting diverges from the Born Rule, this poses trouble for Everettian approaches to probability. The paper also addresses a common argument against branch-counting, namely that the rule is incoherent (...) in light of putative vagueness in the number of branches. Finally, the paper addresses a recent proposal from Simon Saunders that aims to reconcile branch-counting with the Born Rule, arguing that the proposal faces challenges. (shrink)

This article advances two views on the role of evaluative judgment in clinical assessments of decision-making capacity. The first is that it is rationally impossible for such assessments to exclude judgments of the values a patient uses to motivate their decision-making. Predictably, and second, attempting to exclude such judgments sometimes yields outcomes that contain intractable dilemmas that harm patients. These arguments count against the prevailing model of assessment in common law countries—the four abilities model—which is often incorrectly advertised as (...) being value-neutral in respect of patient decision-making both by its proponents and in statute. A straightforward evaluative model of capacity assessment which wears its values on its sleeves and is biased against what are called ‘serious prudential mistakes’ avoids these rational and practical problems. (shrink)

Recent events have revived questions about the circumstances that ought to trigger therapists' duty to warn or protect. There is extensive interstate variation in duty to warn or protect statutes enacted and rulings made in the wake of the California Tarasoff ruling. These duties may be codified in legislative statutes, established in common law through court rulings, or remain unspecified. Furthermore, the duty to warn or protect is not only variable between states but also has been dynamic across time. (...) In this article, we review the implications of this variability and dynamism, focusing on three sets of questions: first, what legal and ethics-related challenges do therapists in each of the three broad categories of states (states that mandate therapists to warn or protect, states that permit therapists to breach confidentiality for warnings but have no mandate, and states that give no guidance) face in handling threats of violence? Second, what training do therapists and other professionals involved in handling violent threats receive, and is this training adequate for the task that these professionals are charged with? Third, how have recent court cases changed the scope of the duty? We conclude by pointing to gaps in the empirical and conceptual scholarship surrounding the duty to warn or protect. (shrink)

I examine and compare Confucian wu-wei rule and Aristotelian non-imperative rule as two models of non-impositional rule. How exactly do non-impositional rulers, according to these thinkers, generate order? And how might a Confucian/Aristotelian dialogue concerning non-impositional rule in distinctively political contexts proceed? Are Confucians and Aristotelians in deep disagreement, or do they actually have more in common than they initially seem?

This addendum presents results that confound some commonly made claims about the sorts of environments in which the performance of TTB exceeds that of Franklin's rule, and vice versa.

The Born’s rule to interpret the square of wave function as the probability to get a specific value in measurement has been accepted as a postulate in foundations of quantum mechanics. Although there have been so many attempts at deriving this rule theoretically using different approaches such as frequency operator approach, many-world theory, Bayesian probability and envariance, literature shows that arguments in each of these methods are circular. In view of absence of a convincing theoretical proof, recently some (...) researchers have carried out experiments to validate the rule up-to maximum possible accuracy using multi-order interference (Sinha et al, Science, 329, 418 [2010]). But, a convincing analytical proof of Born’s rule will make us understand the basic process responsible for exact square dependency of probability on wave function. In this paper, by generalizing the method of calculating probability in common experience into quantum mechanics, we prove the Born’s rule for statistical interpretation of wave function. (shrink)

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer’s wonderful book, The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics, contains a wealth of intriguing arguments and compelling ideas. The present paper focuses on areas of continuing dispute. The paper first attacks LazariRadek’s and Singer’s evolutionary debunking arguments against both egoism and parts of common-sense morality. The paper then addresses their discussion of the role of rules in utilitarianism. De Lazari-Radek and Singer concede that rules should constitute our moral decision (...) procedure and our public morality. This paper argues that, if no one should be blamed for complying with the optimal decision procedure and optimal public rules, there are strong reasons to accept that these same rules determine what is morally permissible from what is morally wrong. (shrink)

This article surveys five approaches to justice in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought: pure proceduralism, the sources thesis, the semiotic model, the social convention model, and the ‘law and...’ model. Each approach has associated justice with the foundation of the legal structure of rules, principles and the like. The foundation for pure proceduralism has rested in the conditions (such as majority will, freedom of expression, and political equality), external to the pure process. For the sources thesis, the foundation has been the (...) state institutions, such as courts and legislatures and ultimately to the state external to the legal structure. With the semiotic model, the structure of signifying concepts (rules, principles, doctrines and other intelligible objects) takes the foundation as a non-signified concept (such as Hans Kelsen’s Grundnorm) external to the signifying relations inside the structure. For the social convention model, the key has been the observation by a jurist of the regularity of a multiplicity of experienced events and the regularity, in turn, is a concept which abstracts from and unifies the multiplicity into a concept. The final approach, the law and…approach, has assumed that the foundation lies in the external and independent disciplinary discourse, thereby reinforcing the observed legal structure as given. -/- The foundation, in each context, has been considered external to the units and analytical reasoning of the legal structure. The foundation, that is, has been considered neither legal nor illegal. The consequence has been that jurists, working within the structure founded by an externality, cannot access justice. The clue to justice, I suggest, is concealed inside the structure itself: namely in the multiplicity of experienced events which the concepts and signifying relations have enclosed and forgotten. The Paper briefly fleshes out the latter sense of access to justice. (shrink)

This paper aims to reevaluate Aristotelian political theory from an egalitarian perspective and to pinpoint its legacy and relevance to contemporary political theory, demonstrating its importance for contemporary liberal democracies in a changing world, suggesting a new critique of liberal and neoliberal political theory and practice, and especially the improvement of our notion of the modern liberal-democratic state, since most contemporary representative liberal democracies fail to take into account the public interest of the many and do very little in order (...) to advance it. The paper will focus on key aspects of Aristotle’s thought, such as his notions of justice (δικαιοσύνη/dikaiosunē and ἁπλῶς δίκαιον/aplōs dikaion), concord (ὁμόμοια/homonoia), friendship (φιλία/philia) and the art of ruling (τέχνη τοῦ ἄρχειν/technē tou archein), arguing that Aristotle’s theory requires us to have concern for our fellow citizens; ‘concern for others’ as opposed to the mere ‘respect for others’ that contemporary neo-Kantian liberalism advocates . Hence, I will examine these aspects of Aristotle’s philosophy that have not so far been adequately discussed, in relation to his conception of the ‘common or public interest’ (τὸ κοινῇ συμφέρον/to koinē sympheron) which is essential in order to understand the Aristotelian vision for ‘the art of politics’ (τέχνη τοῦ ἄρχειν) which should always aim towards the interest of the many, i.e., the people (πλῆθος/plēthos). (shrink)

We argue that there is a tension between two monistic claims that are the core of recent work in epistemic consequentialism. The first is a form of monism about epistemic value, commonly known as veritism: accuracy is the sole final objective to be promoted in the epistemic domain. The other is a form of monism about a class of epistemic scoring rules: that is, strictly proper scoring rules are the only legitimate measures of inaccuracy. These two monisms, we argue, are (...) in tension with each other. If only accuracy has final epistemic value, then there are legitimate alternatives to strictly proper scoring rules. Our argument relies on the way scoring rules are used in contexts where accuracy is rewarded, such as education. (shrink)

To investigate the impact of framing on rule-breaking behavior in social dilemmas, we incorporated a rule in a one-shot resource game with two framing-treatments: One frame was a give-some dilemma (i.e., a variant of a public goods game) and the other frame a take-some dilemma (i.e., a variant of a commons dilemma game). In each frame, all participants were part of one single collective sharing a common good. Each participant was initially equipped with one of five different (...) endowments of points from which they must give/could take amounts to/from the common good. The exact amounts of contributions/withdrawals were regulated by the rule. Participants decided whether to cooperate and comply with the rule or to break the rule to their own advantage and at the expense of the collective (i.e., giving lower/taking higher amounts). Results of an online-experiment with 202 participants showed a significantly higher proportion of individuals breaking the rule in the take-some frame than in the give-some frame. In addition, endowment size influenced the proportion of rule-breaking behavior in the take-some frame. However, the average amounts of points not given/taken too much were not different between the frames. (shrink)

The paper discusses different interpretations of Callicles and Thrasymachus’ positions. There are good reasons for interpreting Callicles as a critic of democracy and as an aristocratic political thinker whose political views are closer to Plato’s than is usually assumed. The paper argues that Callicles defends a natural right of the best citizens to rule over the crowd. However, in contrast to Plato, for Callicles the rule of the best should not aim at the common good but at (...) their personal advantage. The paper also discusses the view that Thrasymachus is just a sociologist of power who diagnoses what actually happens in politics (Henning Ottmann, Max Salomon). This interpretation is still current, and enables us to understand important aspects of legislation in contemporary democracies. Finally, the paper argues that there are reasons to understand Thrasymachus not only as a political realist, but, similar to Protagoras, as a moral sceptic. (shrink)

In his paper “Fairness, Political Obligation, and the Justificatory Gap” (published in the Journal of Moral Philosophy), Jiafeng Zhu argues that the principle of fair play cannot require submission to the rules of a cooperative scheme, and that when such submission is required, the requirement is grounded in consent. I propose a better argument for the claim that fair play requires submission to the rules than the one Zhu considers. I also argue that Zhu’s attribution of consent to people commonly (...) thought to be bound to follow the rules by a duty of fair play is implausible. (shrink)

The tragedy of the commons is a primary contributing factor in ensuring that humanity makes no serious inroads in averting climate change. As a recent Canadian politician pointed out, we could shut down the Canadian economy tomorrow, and it would make no measurable difference in global greenhouse gas emissions. When coordinated effort is required, it would seem that doing the “right thing” alone is irrational: it will harm oneself with no positive consequences as a result. Such is the tragedy. And (...) that is the challenge that we take up here. Though Garrett Hardin suggests that the solution is a governmental process that rules over all contenders, since a world government seems unlikely before the planet hits the tippy point, we suggest an educational initiative instead: one that holds a mirror up to the behaviour of individuals, rather than to the behaviour of individuals in groups. Such an educational initiative would be focused on priming individuals to keep constant track of what they do as individuals as opposed to focusing on the behaviour of humanity in general. Such an educational initiative would focus on tackling the “problem solvers” rather than just “the problem”. (shrink)

Part 1 of this paper discusses some uses of arguments from radical moral disagreement—in particular, as directed against absolutist cognitivism—and surveys some semantic issues thus made salient. It may be argued that parties to such a disagreement cannot be using the relevant moral claims with exactly the same absolutist cognitive content. That challenges the absolutist element of absolutist cognitivism, which, combined with the intractable nature of radical moral disagreement, in turn challenges the viability of a purely cognitivist account of moral (...) judgments. Such a conclusion could be staved off if it could be held that a sufficient condition for commonality of cognitive content in moral judgments could consist, despite the presence of radical moral disagreement, in the parties’acceptance of a common set of fundamental moral principles. Part 1 begins, and Part 2 further develops, a destructive critique of that idea, leading thereby to a skeptical appraisal of the important role sometimes assigned, in metaethical theorizing, to moral rules. Inter alia the paper is intended to suggest the possibility of overlap between relativist and particularist agendas. (shrink)

Cajetan’s analogy theory is usually evaluated in terms of its fidelity to the teachings of Aquinas. But what if Cajetan was trying to answer questions Aquinas himself did not raise, and so could not help to answer? Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia can be interpreted as intending to solve a particular semantic problem: to characterize the unity of the analogical concept, so as to defend the possibility of a non-univocal term’s mediating syllogistic reasoning. Aquinas offers various semantic characterizations of analogy, saying (...) it involves, for instance: signification per prius et posterius; or a ratio propria which is only found in one analogate; or diverse modi significandi with a common res significata. Examined in turn, it is clear that none of Aquinas’s rules for analogy solve the semantic problem described. Cajetan thus cannot be reasonably expected to have intended his analogy treatise primarily as an interpretation or systematization of Aquinas’s teaching on analogy. (shrink)

Elizabeth Karger has suggested an interpretation of Ockham's theory of the modes of common personal supposition ("TM") according to which the purpose of TM is to provide certain distinctions that Ockham will use in formulating a unified theory of immediate inference among certain kinds of sentences. Karger presents a single, powerful rule of inference that incorporates TM distinctions and that is meant to codify Ockham's theory of immediate inference. I raise an objection to Karger's rule, thereby calling (...) into doubt the interpretation of Ockham that is based on attributing that rule to him. (shrink)

The word “populism” commonly elicits images of hordes of angry townspeople with pitchforks and torches. That is the classic picture of “the mob,” bolstered by countless movie and television productions, and it is clearly based on such historical events as the English civil wars, the sans-culottes’ terror, the Bolshevik revolution, and the recent genocides in Rwanda and Burundi. Many of the leaders involved in fostering such horrors are seen as radical democrats whose successors today should also be feared. In this (...) paper, I argue that any mob takeovers of the feared sort are actually antithetical to radical democracy. This is because an authentically democratic regime, even of the most extreme type, is necessarily inconsistent with “mobocracy” or any sort of “tyranny of the majority” given its essential procedural aspects. It is argued, in fact, that leaders of legitimately democratic movements have generally been quite vapid because of the fallibilistic, plebiscitary proceduralism inherent in any authentic attempt to require government policy to reflect the “general will.” And this vapidity is argued to inhere regardless of the extent of rhetorical powers of the advocate or advocacy. (shrink)

Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical conduct for research involving humans, first published in 1998, has recently been updated.1 The US Department of Health and Human Services has just issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would substantially change the 20-year-old Common Rule governing most federally funded research involving human participants.2 A comparison of the two countries’ systems for protecting human research participants is therefore timely. This analysis situates the Canadian system in an international context, with particular attention (...) to its similarities and differences to the US system and their shared challenges going forward with their changes. (shrink)

It is common to think that what theory of linguistic vagueness is correct has implications for debates in philosophy of law. I disagree. I argue that the implications of particular theories of vagueness on substantive issues of legal theory and practice are less far-reaching than often thought. I focus on four putative implications discussed in the literature concerning (i) the value of vagueness in the law, (ii) the possibility and value of legal indeterminacy, (iii) the possibility of the (...) class='Hi'>rule of law, and (iv) strong discretion. I conclude with some methodological remarks. Delineating questions about conventional meaning, the metaphysics/metasemantics of (legal) content determination, and norms of legal interpretation and judicial practice can motivate clearer answers and a more refined understanding of the space of overall theories of vagueness, interpretation, and law. (shrink)

Cet article s’intéresse au problème de la maintenance, c’est-à-dire au moment où les membres d’un collectif social tentent d’assurer dans le temps l’existence de leur collectif en instituant des règles pour réguler leurs comportements. Ce problème se pose avec acuité lorsque certains membres ne respectent pas ces règles communes. Pour maintenir la coopération sociale, les membres peuvent décider d’instituer des règles secondaires visant à sanctionner les transgressions des règles primaires déjà établies. La maintenance d’un collectif peut ainsi reposer sur l’émergence (...) de pouvoirs déontiques qui donnent aux membres l’autorité de légitimement punir et expulser les transgresseurs. Mais d’où viennent ces règles ? On peut penser qu’elles émergent des émotions éprouvées par les membres envers les transgresseurs. Je le démontre à l’aide d’une étude de cas qui établit que, dans le collectif Occupy Geneva, l’institutionnalisation de normes pour punir, exclure et réintégrer les déviants s’ancraient respectivement dans l’indignation, le mépris et le pardon. -/- This article focuses on the problem of maintenance; that is the moment when the members of a social collective attempt to ensure the existence of their collective over time by instituting rules to regulate their behavior. This problem becomes critical when certain members do not respect the common rules. To maintain social cooperation, members can decide to institute secondary rules aimed at sanctioning the transgressions of the already established primary rules. The maintenance of a collective can thus rely on the emergence of deontic powers that give members the authority to legitimately punish and expel transgressors. But where do these rules come from? The hypothesis is that they emerge from the emotions felt by the members towards the transgressors. I show this with the help of a case study, which establishes that the institutionalization of norms allowing the punishment, the exclusion, and the reintegration of deviants within the “Occupy Geneva” collective, was grounded in indignation, contempt, and forgiveness respectively. (shrink)

Tinnitus is a common condition characterized by the perception of sound in the absence of an external source, with potential negative physical and psychological impacts. Accurate and efficient diagnosis of tinnitus is crucial for appropriate treatment and management. Traditional diagnostic methods have limitations in terms of time, cost, and accuracy. To address these challenges, expert systems have emerged as a promising tool for tinnitus diagnosis. This paper explores the application of expert systems in tinnitus diagnosis, highlighting their potential to (...) improve accuracy and efficiency. By incorporating a knowledge base and rule-based decision-making, expert systems can provide valuable insights for accurate diagnosis and appropriate management of tinnitus. Further research and development in this area can enhance the clinical assessment and treatment of tinnitus, ultimately improving the quality of life for affected individuals. (shrink)

Investigation into the sequence structure of the genetic code by means of an informatic approach is a real success story. The features of human language are also the object of investigation within the realm of formal language theories. They focus on the common rules of a universal grammar that lies behind all languages and determine generation of syntactic structures. This universal grammar is a depiction of material reality, i.e., the hidden logical order of things and its relations determined by (...) natural laws. Therefore mathematics is viewed not only as an appropriate tool to investigate human language and genetic code structures through computer sciencebased formal language theory but is itself a depiction of material reality. This confusion between language as a scientific tool to describe observations/experiences within cognitive constructed models and formal language as a direct depiction of material reality occurs not only in current approaches but was the central focus of the philosophy of science debate in the twentieth century, with rather unexpected results. This article recalls these results and their implications for more recent mathematical approaches that also attempt to explain the evolution of human language. (shrink)

In the United States, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has proposed deliberative democracy as an approach for dealing with ethical issues surrounding synthetic biology. Deliberative democracy might similarly help us as we update the regulation of human subjects research. This paper considers how the values that deliberative democratic engagement aims to realize can be realized in a human subjects research context. Deliberative democracy is characterized by an ongoing exchange of ideas between participants, and an effort to (...) justify decisions that bind participants by appeal to reasons that the participants can understand and share. Even when unanimous agreement is not reached, the active participation of everyone along with the requirement that reasons be made accessible enhances the legitimacy of the ultimate outcome. Importantly, deliberative democratic structures avoid strict hierarchies and place participants, as much as possible, in the position of equals. Human subjects research has some features that may make deliberative democratic principles seem initially unappealing. For one, there are asymmetries in knowledge between expert researchers conducting the research and participants in the research process. For another, statistical validity is made easiest by research paradigms that produce standardized, quantitative data, which can be difficult to achieve if research participants are given the power to deliberatively reshape the research design as it progresses. These and other problems have tended to produce a human subjects research process where subjects do not actively participate in shaping research, but rather consent to a predefined set of interventions designed by expert researchers and vetted by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). In this paper, I suggest some ways in which human subjects research could do more to realize deliberative democratic values, and, in particular, how a revised Common Rule might help to realize these values. First, research participants could be treated not as passive subjects but instead involved in research design, ethical review, and the ongoing conduct and dissemination of research. Such participation might involve, for instance, including people who have served as research subjects on IRBs, or replacing IRB oversight for certain forms of research exempted from IRB oversight under a revised Common Rule with oversight by a body of community members or research subjects. It might also involve having the oversight of research that uses more participatory models be more participatory and less hierarchical in nature. I also raise questions about the exemption of research on public benefit programs from any research-level oversight and from consent requirements. While IRBs are likely not the correct overseers, there may be good reason to view such research with a critical eye, because of its potential for long-range impacts on the lives of participants. By giving research subjects a greater voice in research that aims at fine-tuning public benefit programs on which subjects rely, a deliberative oversight process has the potential to recast research participation as a form of active democratic participation and to address a “democratic deficit” in public health. Numerous proposals regarding health care have called for greater participation by laypeople and a more nonhierarchical approach to setting health priorities. Involving lay research subjects in the conduct of public benefits research and other forms of public health research may help to further these goals. (shrink)

There has been a growing concern over establishing norms that ensure the ethically acceptable and scientifically sound conduct of clinical trials. Among the leading norms internationally are the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, guidelines by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, the International Conference on Harmonization's standards for industry, and the CONSORT group's reporting norms, in addition to the influential U.S. Federal Common Rule, Food and Drug Administration's body of regulations, and information sheets by the (...) Department of Health and Human Services. There are also many norms published at more local levels by official agencies and professional groups.Any account of international standards should cover both scientific and ethical norms at once – the two are conceptually intertwined. Recent sources recognize that “[s]cientifically unsound research on human subjects is unethical in that it exposes research subjects to risks without possible benefit.”. (shrink)

In common treatments of deontic logic, the obligatory is what is true in all deontically ideal possible worlds. In this article, I offer a new semantics for Standard Deontic Logic with Leibnizian intensions rather than possible worlds. Even though the new semantics furnishes models that resemble Venn diagrams, the semantics captures the strong soundness and completeness of Standard Deontic Logic. Since, unlike possible worlds, many Leibnizian intensions are not maximally consistent entities, we can amend the semantics to invalidate the (...) inference rule which ensures that all tautologies are obligatory. I sketch this amended semantics to show how it invalidates the rule in a new way. (shrink)

The present volume is the fourth issue of the Almanac series entitled ‘Evolu-tion’. Thus, one can maintain that our Almanac, which has actually turned into a Yearbook, has succeeded (see below). The title of the present volume is ‘From Big Bang to Nanorobots’. In this way we demonstrate that all phases of megaevolution and Big History are cov-ered in the articles of the present Yearbook. Several articles also present fore-casts about possible future developments. The main objective of our Yearbook as (...) well as of the previous issues (see Grinin, Korotayev, Carneiro, and Spier 2011a, Grinin, Korotayev, and Rodrigue 2011a, Grinin and Korotayev 2013a) is the creation of a unified inter-disciplinary field of research in which scientists specializing in different disci-plines could work within a framework of unified or similar paradigms, using common terminology and searching for common rules, tendencies and regularities. At the same time for the formation of such an integrated field one should use all available opportunities: theories, laws and methods. In the present volume, a number of such approaches including those which will be described below are used. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to discuss Kant’s concept of juridical state as the foundation of the contemporary rule of law. Therefore, the article tries to answer two questions: (1) what character can be attributed to Kant’s concept of juridical state taking into account the obligations arising from it; (2) can the analysis of the Kantian juridical state have any impact on the contemporary understanding of the rule of law and if so, what can this impact be. (...) In order to accomplish this task, moral presuppositions of Kant’s juridical state are discussed, according to the commonly accepted view that Kant’s political philosophy is closely linked with his moral and ethical reflection. Then, two interpretations of Kant’s juridical state – the liberal one and the authoritarian one – are analysed. The crucial difference between these interpretations lies in establishing the circumstances in which the duty of obedience to state power should be carried out. Then, Kantian juridical state is compared with two ways of understanding the rule of law – the material one and the formal one – in order to evaluate whether the rule of law should be considered as continuity of or rupture with the Kantian concept. (shrink)

In Republic 8–9, Socrates describes four main kinds of vicious people, all of whose souls are “ruled” by an element other than reason, and in some of whom reason is said to be “enslaved.” What role does reason play in such souls? In this paper, I argue, based on Republic 8–9 and related passages, and in contrast to some common alternative views, that for Plato the “enslavement” of reason consists in this: instead of determining for itself what is good, (...) reason is forced to desire and pursue as good a goal determined by the soul’s ruler. (shrink)

Recent authors have drawn attention to a new kind of defeating evidence commonly referred to as higher-order evidence. Such evidence works by inducing doubts that one’s doxastic state is the result of a flawed process – for instance, a process brought about by a reason-distorting drug. I argue that accommodating defeat by higher-order evidence requires a two-tiered theory of justification, and that the phenomenon gives rise to a puzzle. The puzzle is that at least in some situations involving higher-order defeaters (...) the correct epistemic rules issue conflicting recommendations. For instance, a subject ought to believe p, but she ought also to suspend judgment in p. I discuss three responses. The first resists the puzzle by arguing that there is only one correct epistemic rule, an Über-rule. The second accepts that there are genuine epistemic dilemmas. The third appeals to a hierarchy or ordering of correct epistemic rules. I spell out problems for all of these responses. I conclude that the right lesson to draw from the puzzle is that a state can be epistemically rational or justified even if one has what looks to be strong evidence to think that it is not. As such, the considerations put forth constitute a non question-begging argument for a kind of externalism. (shrink)