When is state coercion for the provision of public goods justified? And how should the social surplus of public goods be distributed? Philosophers approach these questions by distinguishing between essential and discretionary public goods. This article explains the intractability of this distinction, and presents two upshots. First, if governments provide configurations of public goods that simultaneously serve essential and discretionary purposes, the scope for justifiable complaints by honest holdouts is narrower than commonly assumed. Second, however, claims to distributive fairness in (...) the provision of public goods also turn out to be more complex to assess. (shrink)

Restraint as a Source of Judicial ‘Apoliticality’: A Functional Reconstruction Few legal theorists today would argue that the domain of law exists in isolation from other normative spheres governing society, notably from the domain of ‘politics’. Nevertheless, the implicit norm that judges should not act ‘politically’ remains influential and widespread in the debates surrounding controversial court cases. This article aims to square these two observations. Taking the Miller v. Secretary of State and Urgenda cases as illustrative case studies, the article (...) demonstrates that what it means for judges to adjudicate cases ‘apolitically’ is itself a matter of controversy. In reflecting on their own constitutional role, courts are forced to take a stance on substantive questions of political philosophy. Nevertheless, that does not mean that the ‘norm of judicial apoliticality’ should therefore be rejected. The norm’s coherence lies in its intersocial function: its role in declaring certain modes of judicial interpretation and intervention legitimate (‘legal’/‘judicial’) or illegitimate (‘political’). (shrink)

Normative literature on the Catalan crisis is largely occupied with the conflict’s central legalistic problem: can political units like Catalonia be allowed to split off from Spain unilaterally? This article reframes the issue and asks why secessionist Catalans should ever abide by Spanish legal constraints, given that Spanish law is precisely the institution they are politically trying to get rid of. It focuses on the anti-secessionist role played by the Spanish Constitutional Court between 2010 and 2017 and studies three arguments (...) why Catalans supposedly have to accept the Court’s authority. The article contends that two arguments—the “mutual benefit argument” and the “law and democracy” argument—will not be independently persuasive to Catalan secessionists. Instead, the Constitutional Court’s authority must ultimately be grounded in a different type of argument: the “law and order argument.” Secessionist Catalans’ supposed duty to obey the orders of the Constitutional Court is ultimately not rooted in a positive service provided by the Court, but in the disruptive effects of disobeying. That exposes an explanatory defect in Joseph Raz’s influential theory of authority, which seeks to ground authority exercises in a concept in prior reason or their capacity to make our life better. That conceptualization misses the key decisionistic element to political authority: its capacity to constitute our reasons, that is, to define the terms that give meaning to our evaluations. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of asking questions as an important element of international business negotiation where there are differences in cultural background. A Dutch-Spanish difference in questioning was related to differences between the two parties in uncertainty reduction and negotiation goals. All 480 questions in 8 simulated Kelley game negotiations were reviewed: both monocultural and intercultural, i.e. 2 cultures and 3 languages. This analysis may also allow an illustration of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which holds, at least in its weak (...) version, that culture frames language and language frames culture. It may also be possible to determine the extent to which intercultural differences between Dutch and Spanish questioning behaviours - assuming they can be ascertained in comparison with monocultural Dutch and Spanish behaviour - are language bound. In other words, do negotiators use a different typology of questions in their native language than in a neutral language? A comparison of the monocultural and intercultural data makes it possible to illustrate the above hypothesis, and to establish how far the L1-culture connection differs from that of the L2-culture. For another similar test on culture-language relations in South African mathematics texts and their readers, see Prins and Ulijn. The uncertainty reduction theory of Berger and the negotiation models developed by Fisher and Ury and Mastenbroek are related to question behaviour, which is analysed with the Verbal Response Mode Taxonomy of Stiles. Pre- and post-negotiation questionnaires were developed and administered to relate the results of the linguistic analysis to the perceptions of the negotiators in order to test the ecological validity of UR. Asking questions appeared to be a critical success factor in both monocultural and intercultural business negotiation on the basis of their relation with UR variables and Kelley game profit levels, but in a different sense to Gudykunst et al., who suggest that questions reduce uncertainty by increasing attributional confidence in a general way, seemingly irrespective of a national cultural background. In this study the Dutch, starting from a higher level of issue-related global confidence, used questions significantly less than the Spanish to attribute confidence to the person, indicating a cultural difference. Most questioning differences appeared to be language - as well as culture-bound. The Spanish asked significantly more for acknowledgement, and the Dutch asked more indirect questions with disclosure, but the two groups did not differ in global uncertainty and attributional confidence after their negotiations. They seemed to reduce uncertainty by adopting a passive, unobtrusive observation strategy. It may be that the type of information needed to become more confident depends on the communicator's personality rather than on his or her cultural background. Dutch and Spanish managers would therefore be advised to balance openness and vagueness to reach their negotiation goals in maximizing profits by using a combination of clear and ambiguous questions and answers and to be aware of the linguistic differences in questioning between Spanish and Dutch, which may even be carried over to English when it is used as a tool of communication. (shrink)

Michael Oakeshott’s account of political economy is claimed to have found its ‘apotheosis under Thatcherism’. Against critics who align him with a preference for small government, this article points to Oakeshott’s stress on the indispensability of an infrastructure of government-provided public goods, in which individual agency and associative freedom can flourish. I argue that Oakeshott’s account of political economy invites a contestatory politics over three types of public goods, which epitomize the unresolvable tension he diagnosed between nomocratic and teleocratic conceptions (...) of the modern state. These three types are the system of civil law, the by-products of the operation of civil law and public goods which result from policies. The article concludes that Oakeshott offers an important corrective to political theories which favour either market mediation or radical democratic governance of the commons as self-sustaining modes of providing and enjoying goods. (shrink)

Looking times and gaze behavior indicate that infants can predict the goal state of an observed simple action event (e.g., object‐directed grasping) already in the first year of life. The present paper mainly focuses on infants’ predictive gaze‐shifts toward the goal of an ongoing action. For this, infants need to generate a forward model of the to‐be‐obtained goal state and to disengage their gaze from the moving agent at a time when information about the action event is still incomplete. By (...) about 6 months of age, infants show goal‐predictive gaze‐shifts, but mainly for familiar actions that they can perform themselves (e.g., grasping) and for familiar agents (e.g., a human hand). Therefore, some theoretical models have highlighted close relations between infants’ ability for action‐goal prediction and their motor development and/or emerging action experience. Recent research indicates that infants can also predict action goals of familiar simple actions performed by non‐human agents (e.g., object‐directed grasping by a mechanical claw) when these agents display agency cues, such as self‐propelled movement, equifinality of goal approach, or production of a salient action effect. This paper provides a review on relevant findings and theoretical models, and proposes that the impacts of action experience and of agency cues can be explained from an action‐event perspective. In particular, infants’ goal‐predictive gaze‐shifts are seen as resulting from an interplay between bottom‐up processing of perceptual information and top‐down influences exerted by event schemata that store information about previously executed or observed actions. (shrink)

Obwohl sie durch das Werk von MoNTESQUIEU erst auf die praktische Staatskunst von Einfluss geworden ist, so ist doch die Lehre der drei Staatsfunktionen schon von sehr altem Datum. Die Spuren einer Einteilung der Staatsaufgabe kann man bereits 1 bei ARISTOTELES finden. Er unterscheidet in der Politica ) drei Elemente. Das Verhältnis dieser die Staatsaufgabe konstituierenden Elemente ist verschieden und charakteristisch für den Regierungs typus, und ARISTOTELES hält es für die Pflicht des Gesetzgebers, eines und das andre so anzuordnen, wie (...) es sich für jede Gemein schaft passt. Man kann dann nach ARISTOTELES unterscheiden, erstens die beratende Funktion, welche die autoritative Beschluss fassung über Krieg und Frieden, das Schliessen oder Brechen von Bündnissen, die Verfassung von Gesetzen, das Treffen von Ent scheidungen über 'Todesstrafe, Verbannung und Konfiskation, sowie die Anstellung von Magistraten umfasst. Daneben nennt ARISTOTELES die vollziehende Funktion der Obrigkeit und die richterliche Funktion. 2 JEAN BoDIN ) kommt bei der Analysierung der Souveränität zu fünf Elementen, nämlich Gesetzgebung, Entscheidung über Krieg und Frieden, Ernennung von Beamten, Rechtsprechung und Begnadigung. (shrink)

This paper describes a study of the effects of two acts of social intelligence, namely mimicry and social praise, when used by an artificial social agent. An experiment ( N = 50) is described which shows that social praise—positive feedback about the ongoing conversation—increases the perceived friendliness of a chat-robot. Mimicry—displaying matching behavior—enhances the perceived intelligence of the robot. We advice designers to incorporate both mimicry and social praise when their system needs to function as a social actor. Different ways (...) of implementing mimicry and praise by artificial social actors in an ambient persuasive scenario are discussed. (shrink)

The commons have emerged as a key notion and underlying experience of many efforts around the world to promote justice and democracy. A central question for political theories of the commons is whether the visions of social order and regimes of political economy they propose are complementary or opposed to public goods that are backed up by governmental coordination and compulsion. This essay argues that the post-Marxist view, which posits an inherent opposition between the commons as a sphere of inappropriable (...) usage and statist public infrastructure, is mistaken, because justice and democracy are not necessarily furthered by the institution of inappropriability. I articulate an alternative pluralist view based on James Tully’s work, which discloses the dynamic interplay between public and common modes of provision and enjoyment, and their civil and civic orientations respectively. Finally, the essay points to the Janus-faced character of the commons and stresses the co-constitutive role of public goods and social services for just and orderly social life while remaining attentive to the dialectic of empowerment and tutelage that marks provision by government. (shrink)

This essay seeks to set to work on the question of race and the futures of the postcolonial in post-apartheid South Africa through abiding by the site of the indeterminacy between problem and critique. Arguing that reading, in the robust sense offered by Gayatri Spivak and Stuart Hall, is a necessary and urgent response to the question, the paper examines the interventions of three key figures for thinking radical black thought in our time, namely Achille Mbembe's Critique of Black Reason, (...) Nahum Chandler's X: The Problem of the negro as a Problem for Thought, and Qadri Ismail's Culture and Eurocentrism. Through abiding by the stakes of the work of reading in this conjuncture, I argue that it is through resisting the easy route of cultural and relativized difference that the pedagogical work of reading, and teaching reading, for the future, becomes possible. (shrink)

Michael Oakeshott’s account of political economy is claimed to have found its ‘apotheosis under Thatcherism’. Against critics who align him with a preference for small government, this article points to Oakeshott’s stress on the indispensability of an infrastructure of government-provided public goods, in which individual agency and associative freedom can flourish. I argue that Oakeshott’s account of political economy invites a contestatory politics over three types of public goods, which epitomize the unresolvable tension he diagnosed between nomocratic and teleocratic conceptions (...) of the modern state. These three types are the system of civil law, the by-products of the operation of civil law and public goods which result from policies. The article concludes that Oakeshott offers an important corrective to political theories which favour either market mediation or radical democratic governance of the commons as self-sustaining modes of providing and enjoying goods. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 8, August 2021.

This article considers Hugo Grotius’s ideas on a specific topic of commercial law, analysing his position and potential contributions to early modern Dutch insolvency legislation. It might be questioned how ‘Hollandic’ Grotius’s interpretations of legal solutions for insolvency as presented in the Inleidinge tot de Hollandsche Rechts-Geleerdheid actually were. Grotius’s treatment of cessie van goede is relatively strict, whereas compositions are hardly mentioned. A rather different image rises from his later work. Here, Grotius displays a more radical view, in specific (...) cases allowing the sovereign to interfere in private property rights and to restructure debts for the common good. It is an intriguing question if and to what extent these ideas can be related to contemporary Dutch insolvency practices. (shrink)

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

What are the main features that influence our attribution of moral responsibility? It is widely accepted that there are various factors which strongly influence our moral judgments, such as the agent’s intentions, the consequences of the action, the causal involvement of the agent, and the agent’s freedom and ability to do otherwise. In this paper, we argue that this picture is incomplete: We argue that social roles are an additional key factor that is radically underestimated in the extant literature. We (...) will present an experiment to support this claim. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering means to provide a method to assess and improve our concepts working as cognitive devices. But conceptual engineering still lacks an account of what concepts are (as cognitive devices) and of what engineering is (in the case of cognition). And without such prior understanding of its subject matter, or so it is claimed here, conceptual engineering is bound to remain useless, merely operating as a piecemeal approach, with no overall grip on its target domain. The purpose of this (...) programmatic paper is to overcome this knowledge gap by providing some guidelines for developing the theories of concepts and of cognition that will ground the systematic unified framework needed to effectively implement conceptual engineering as a widely applicable method for the cognitive optimization of our conceptual devices. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the method for assessing and improving our concepts. Some have recently claimed that the implementation of such method in the form of ameliorative projects is truth-driven and should thus be epistemically constrained, ultimately at least (Simion 2018; cf. Podosky 2018). This paper challenges that claim on the assumption of a social constructionist analysis of ideologies, and provides an alternative, pragmatic and cognitive framework for determining the legitimacy of ameliorative conceptual projects overall. The upshot is that one should (...) not ameliorate for the sake of truth or knowledge, in the case of ideologies—at least, not primarily. (shrink)

A significant proportion of states grants constitutional recognition to a single religion, leaving various other religions within society constitutionally unrecognised. Many philosophers believe that this is problematic even when such recognition is (almost) wholly symbolic. The four most common and prima facie plausible objections to what I call ‘mono-recognition’ are that it alienates citizens who do not adhere to the constitutionally recognised religion; that it symbolically subordinates these individuals; that it reinforces oppressive social hierarchies; and that it violates principles of (...) justificatory neutrality. This article shows that none of these objections establish that mono-recognition is wrong within contemporary societies—or even merely pro tanto wrong. However, it goes on to propose a novel argument that does suggest that this type of religious establishment is pro tanto wrong within most societies, if not all. According to this argument, which I refer to as the ‘desire-based objection’, mono-recognition is pro tanto wrong when it fails to accommodate at least some citizens (a) who desire constitutional recognition of their unrecognised religion on morally reasonable, or simply not unreasonable, grounds or who would do so if they were to independently ponder the possibility of receiving such recognition without having to fear any social backlash that receiving it might cause and (b) whose religion is entitled to constitutional recognition based on the size of its population within society; the societal contributions of its members; and any injustices that its members have suffered at the hands of the state or the wider society. As I show, even when one particular religion has the strongest claim to constitutional recognition, this does not normally justify granting sole recognition to it given that the weaker claims of other religions could be accommodated under a system whereby state religions are rotated and recognised for different durations depending on the strength of their claims. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the method for assessing and improving our concepts. However, little has been written about how best to conceive of concepts for the purposes of conceptual engineering. In this paper, I aim to fill this foundational gap, proceeding in three main steps: First, I propose a methodological framework for evaluating the conduciveness of a given concept of concept for conceptual engineering. Then, I develop a typology that contrasts two competing concepts of concept that can be used in conceptual (...) engineering — namely, the philosophical and psychological ones. Finally, I evaluate these two concepts of concept using the proposed methodological framework and I show that, when it comes to making conceptual engineering an actionable method, the psychological concept of concept outclasses its philosophical counterpart on all counts. This provides a baseline from which the concept of concept can be further improved for the purposes of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

This chapter replies to and reflects on the comments and discussions provided by the contributors to the festschrift.

According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and the speaker might be required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test in three experiments with over 740 participants. It (...) turns out that the linguistic behaviour of ordinary English speakers is consistent with contextualist predictions and inconsistent with the predictions of the most widely discussed form of truth relativism advocated by John MacFarlane. (shrink)

The recent controversy about misinformation has moved a question into the focus of the public eye that has occupied philosophers for decades: Under what conditions is it appropriate to assert a certain claim? When asserting a claim that x, must one know that x? Must x be true? Might it be normatively acceptable to assert whatever one believes? In the largest cross-cultural study to date (total n = 1,091) on the topic, findings from the United States, Germany, and Japan suggest (...) that, in order to claim that x, x need not be known, and it can be false. However, the data show, we do expect considerable epistemic responsibility on the speaker’s behalf: In order to appropriately assert a claim, the speaker must have good reasons to believe it. (shrink)