In the essay “Justice and Rights” of his book Taking Rights Seriously Ronald Dworkin puts forward an account of reflective equilibrium which has become an orthodoxy in interpreting John Rawls' theory of justice. My purpose here is to challenge this account, on the grounds that it presupposes an untenable view of the relation between belief and choice.

In the third century BC Rome embarked on the expansion which was ultimately to leave her mistress of the Mediterranean world. As part of that expansion a national literature arose, springing from the union of native linguistic energy with Greek literary forms. Shortly after the middle of the century the first Latin play took the stage; by 100 BC most of the important genres invented by the Greeks - epic, tragedy, comedy, historiography, oratory - were solidly established in their adoptive (...) Roman forms, and a new genre, satire, had been born. The chapters in this volume describe and analyse the process of creative adaptation which shaped the beginnings of Latin literature and laid the foundations for its future development as one of the great literatures of the world. Essential background is provided by introductory chapters on readers and critics in the Roman world. In these are described the form of the books themselves and the conditions under which they were produced, circulated and read. The whole volume offers an indispensable introduction to the understanding of the nature and quality of Latin literature. (shrink)

This paper is based on a semantic foundation of quantum logic which makes use of dialog-games. In the first part of the paper the dialogic method is introduced and under the conditions of quantum mechanical measurements the rules of a dialog-game about quantum mechanical propositions are established. In the second part of the paper the quantum mechanical dialog-game is replaced by a calculus of quantum logic. As the main part of the paper we show that the calculus of quantum logic (...) is complete and consistent with respect to the dialogic semantics. Since the dialoggame does not involve the 'excluded middle' the calculus represents a calculus of effective (intuitionistic) quantum logic. In a forthcoming paper it is shown that this calculus is equivalent to a calculus of sequents and more interestingly to a calculus of propositions. With the addition of the 'excluded middle' the latter calculus is a model for the lattice of subspaces of a Hilbert space. (shrink)

Despite its theoretical importance, little is known about how semantic memory structure facilitates and constrains creative idea generation. We examine whether the semantic richness of a concept has both benefits and costs to creative idea generation. Specifically, we tested whether cue set size—an index of semantic richness reflecting the average number of elements associated with a given concept—impacts the quantity (fluency) and quality (originality) of responses generated during the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Across four studies, we show that low-association, sparse, (...) AUT cues benefit originality at the cost of fluency compared to high-association, rich, AUT cues. Furthermore, we found an interaction with individual differences in fluid intelligence in the low-association AUT cues, suggesting that constraints of sparse semantic knowledge can be overcome with top-down intervention. Our findings indicate that semantic richness differentially impacts the quality and quantity of generated ideas, and that cognitive control processes can facilitate idea production when conceptual knowledge is limited. (shrink)