bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Rule of law (Rechtsstaat)
Authors: Allan T.R.S.
Published: September 2018

The ‘rule of law’ most simply expresses the idea that everyone is subject to the law, and should therefore obey it. Governments in particular are to obey law – to govern under, or in accordance with, law. The rule of law thus requires constitutional government, and constitutes a shield against tyranny or arbitrary rule: political rulers and their agents (police and so on) must exercise power under legal constraints, respecting accepted constitutional limits. The British and US conceptions of this ideal find a parallel in the Germanic concept of the Rechtsstaat, or ‘state-under-law’, where the state as an organized entity is conceived to be limited by laws and by fundamental principles of legality, rather than being a purely political organization that can dispense with law in the interests of policy. Such concepts play an essential part in the political philosophy of liberalism; yet, characteristically, their more detailed exposition and indeed their nature and meaning are contested and controversial.

In a wider sense, the rule of law articulates values of procedural fairness or due process which affect the form of legal rules and govern the manner of their application. Those values both enhance the utility of legal regulation and also acknowledge underlying ideas of human dignity and autonomy. In a further sense, the rule of law refers to the faithful application of those rules and principles which constitute the law of a particular legal system. It expresses the idea that legal obligation should always be determined in particular cases by analysis of existing law – as opposed to ad hoc legislation by judges – even where disagreement may exist about the true meaning or content of the law.

The connection between the rule of law and justice is complex. The rule of law cannot itself guarantee justice, but it forms an essential precondition. In so far as it imposes formal constraints on the laws enacted or enforced, which ensure that they are capable of being obeyed and that they are fairly administered, the rule of law assumes a conception of moral personality – of how individuals should be treated, as responsible human beings, capable of a sense of justice – which links the idea with the values of freedom and autonomy, and the ideal of equality.
Roman law
Authors: Birks P.B.H.
Published: September 2018

Law was Rome’s greatest gift to the intellect of modern Europe. Even today the Roman law library, and the achievements of the jurists who built it up, live on in the law of the Continental jurisdictions and of other countries farther afield. It is true that over the past two centuries codification has largely interrupted the long tradition of direct recourse to the Roman materials, but the concepts applied in civilian jurisdictions and the categories of legal thought which they use are still in large measure those of the Roman jurists. In England, perhaps for no better reason than that from the late thirteenth century the judges of the King’s Bench and Common Pleas happened to come from a background which cut them off from the clerical education which had given their predecessors access to the Roman library, there was no reception of Roman law. Post-Norman England thus became the second Western society to set about building up a mature law library from scratch. The common law (being the law common to the whole realm of England) and the civil law (being the ius civile, the law pertaining to the civis, the citizen, initially of course the Roman citizen) thus became the two principal families within the Western legal tradition. It is wrong, however, to suppose that the development of the common law was constantly isolated. There have on the contrary been important points of contact at almost all periods. One result is that the categories of English legal thought are not in fact dissimilar to those of the jurisdictions of continental Europe. The study of Roman law has contributed immeasurably to the idea of a rational normative order, an idea fundamental to legal philosophy as indeed to all practical philosophy.
Bobbio, Norberto (1909–2004)
Authors: Borsellino Patrizia
Published: September 2018

The foremost legal and political theorist in Italy today, Norberto Bobbio founded in the 1940s Italian analytical legal positivism, trying to merge logical positivism and Kelsen’s legal positivism. As a political thinker, he defends a synthesis of liberalism and socialism, focusing in particular on the defence of human and civil rights in democratic societies.
Bryce, James (1838–1922)
Authors: Munro Colin
Published: September 2018

James Bryce, British statesman and writer, combined a distinguished public life with scholarship in history, politics and law. As a jurist his interest lay in historical jurisprudence, but he is best remembered for his comparative politics. He contributed significantly to democratic political theory and to a liberal-historicist approach in philosophy of law.
Dicey, Albert Venn (1835–1922)
Authors: Loughlin Martin
Published: September 2018

A.V. Dicey, who held the Vinerian Chair of English Law at Oxford University between 1882 and 1909, is widely regarded as the high priest of orthodox constitutional thought in Britain. Living through a period of great political and economic change, Dicey recognized that the duty of the constitutional lawyer could no longer be one of simply venerating Britain’s ancestral, unwritten constitution. He appreciated the need to try to lay bare its legal foundations and to identify its fundamental principles. In embarking on this exercise, Dicey, a follower of John Austin, employed an analytical method which treated law as a datum to be analysed and classified and which served to furnish a descriptive account of how law’s various divisions fit together to provide an ordered whole. Dicey was the first to apply this legal positivist method to the study of constitutional law in Britain. The method became so ensconced in legal thought in twentieth-century Britain that today lawyers scarcely acknowledge any work in constitutional law which predates Dicey’s work. It is as though he invented the subject.
Frank, Jerome (1889–1957)
Authors: Duxbury Neil , MacCormick Neil
Published: September 2018

Jerome Frank was a significant contributor to the ‘realist’ movement in US legal theory. He is most closely associated with ‘fact scepticism’, the view that legal processes, especially court processes, are afflicted with pervasive uncertainty and unpredictability because of the difficulties of finding out with certainty or even strongly justified confidence what happened in the past.
Hohfeld, Wesley Newcomb (1879–1918)
Authors: MacCormick Neil
Published: September 2018

W.N. Hohfeld, US law professor and proponent of analytical jurisprudence, was responsible for one of the most influential analyses of the concept of a right in legal and moral philosophy. He offered to resolve all complex legal relations into a few simple and elementary ones, often confusedly referred to as ‘rights’.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr (1841–1935)
Authors: Kramer Matthew H.
Published: September 2018

The most famous judge in the history of the USA, Holmes was also one of the most important US legal theorists. Within US jurisprudence, his work prefigured and stimulated the development of a general distrust of abstractions. Holmes emphasized that, in so far as logical deductions and abstract principles play any role at all in the law, they are side-effects of the ways in which struggles among different interests have been varyingly resolved. For him, the life of the law was not logic but experience; and experience was too diverse and conflict-ridden to be controllable on the basis of any sweeping formulae.
Justinian (AD 482–565)
Authors: McLeod Grant
Published: September 2018

There was a late Roman renaissance during Justinian’s reign in the sixth century ad. Its high point was the compilation by his minister Tribonian of a huge restatement of Roman law in four works, the Institutes, Digest, Code and Novels, preserving a selection of its achievements. Called by medieval lawyers the Corpus iuris civilis, it is the basic material for studying Roman law and the source of much of Europe’s legal thinking.
Llewellyn, Karl Nickerson (1893–1962)
Authors: MacCormick Neil , Twining William
Published: September 2018

Karl Llewellyn was philosophically the most original of the ‘American Realist’ jurists. His line of argument, sometimes misleadingly called ‘rule-scepticism’, casts doubt on received approaches to the formulation of legal rules and traditional assumptions about the part they play in law. His approach to law is an essentially functionalist one, owing much to philosophical pragmatism.
Olivecrona, Karl (1897–1980)
Authors: Peczenik Aleksander
Published: September 2018

Olivecrona was a Swedish jurist of the ’realist’ school, and from 1933 Professor of Procedural Law in the University of Lund. He regards law as a body of ‘independent imperatives’ effective in bringing about certain patterns of behaviour in society. The reality of law is psychological and behavioural, not dependent on some metaphysical world of norms.
Petrażycki, Leon (1867–1931)
Authors: Peczenik Aleksander
Published: September 2018

Leon Petrażycki was a strikingly original philosopher of law whose theoretical system ranged over moral and legal philosophy, theory of science, psychology and sociology. The aim of his philosophy of law is ‘Legal Policy’, that is, social engineering through law directed at the ‘social ideal of love’.
Pound, Roscoe (1870–1964)
Authors: MacCormick Neil
Published: September 2018

Roscoe Pound was a legal thinker who exercised profound influence in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. The approach he advocated, under the banner ‘sociological jurisprudence’, was to present law as essentially an instrument for the pursuit and reconciliation of human interests.
Pufendorf, Samuel (1632–94)
Authors: Ford J.D.
Published: September 2018

Pufendorf was the first university professor of the law of nature and nations. His De iure naturae et gentium (On the Law of Nature and Nations) (1672) and De officio hominis et civis iuxta legem naturalem (On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law) (1673) greatly influenced the handling of that subject in the eighteenth century. As a result Pufendorf has been recognized as an important figure in the development of the conception of international law as a body of norms commonly agreed to have universal validity by sovereign states. He regarded himself as an exponent of a new moral science founded by Hugo Grotius which transformed the natural law tradition by starting from identifiable traits of human nature rather than ideas about what human beings ought to be.
Radbruch, Gustav (1878–1949)
Authors: La Torre Massimo
Published: September 2018

Gustav Radbruch is an emblematic figure in twentieth-century German legal philosophy and legal science. His particular blending of legal philosopher, dogmatist and politician, and his personal history, interwoven with the tragedy of the Weimar Republic and the rebirth of a democratic Germany after the Nazi horror, have given him special prestige and influence on both constitutional and ordinary jurisprudence in Germany. Some of Radbruch’s theses, like the one in his well-known article ‘Gesetzliches Unrecht und übergesetzliches Recht’ (1946 – translatable as ‘Statutory Non-law and Suprastatutory Law’), remain highly topical in German universities and courts.
Savigny, Friedrich Karl von (1779–1861)
Authors: MacCormick Neil
Published: September 2018

Friedrich Karl von Savigny was a powerfully influential student of Roman law both in its medieval manifestations and in the contemporary ‘Pandektenrecht’ (law based on Justinian’s Pandects, or Digest) of nineteenth-century Germany. His contributions to the philosophy of law are in the spirit of the Romantic movement, and lay stress on the organic character of the legal experience of a people, hence favouring customary law over statute law, and opposing the contemporary movement towards codification. A founder of what is sometimes called the ‘historical school’ in the philosophy of law, he argues that law is to be understood always in its historical setting, the result of a process of historical development, not simply as the arbitrary command of a – perhaps transitory – sovereign power.
Selden, John (1584–1654)
Authors: Goodrich Peter
Published: September 2018

Antiquarian, philologist, parliamentarian, legal historian and practising lawyer, John Selden was a major figure in the renaissance and systematization of common law. In jurisprudence, his importance lies in his attempt to develop certain elements of an epistemology of common law. He made use of history to criticize current legal doctrines, and developed a philosophical methodology in relation to the interpretation of precedent.
Villey, Michel (1914–88)
Authors: MacCormick Neil
Published: September 2018

Michel Villey was France’s leading post-war philosopher of law in the ‘natural law’ mode. He aimed to rediscover a distinctively philosophical approach to law rooted in the history both of legal ideas and of legal institutions. Legal institutions he considered to have been uniquely a gift of Greco-Roman civilization to the world. They represent a distinctive domain of human activity, concerned with an objectively just ordering of human relationships as these affect external conduct and the possession and use of things. Villey has in common with legal positivism a belief in the differentiation of the legal, concerned with objective interpersonal relations in their ‘external’ concern with a distribution of things, from morality and from religion with their distinctively ‘internal’ and ‘spiritual’ concerns. In opposition to legal positivism, however, he holds that justice is a concept implicit in the legal, and discountenances positivists’ tendency to reduce law to a simple aggregation of enacted statutes.
Weinberger, Ota (1919–2009)
Authors: MacCormick Neil
Published: September 2018

Weinberger is noted as a proponent of ‘institutionalist positivism’ in legal theory. By contrast with earlier forms of so-called ‘institutionalism’ in law, Weinberger advances a theory in which norms are ideal entities linked by logical relations inter se, while being at the same time social realities identifiable in terms of the effect they exercise in guiding human social behaviour. The institutions which make possible this duality of ideal entity and social reality have themselves to be understood as structured by norms. Hence, in contrast with earlier proponents of institutionalism, who denied the foundation of law in norms, Weinberger is normativist in his approach; and for the metaphysical vitalism of precursors, he substitutes a social realism.
Weyr, František (1879–1951)
Authors: Weinberger Ota
Published: September 2018

František (Franz) Weyr was Professor in Legal Philosophy and Public Law in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and a main author of the Czechoslovakian Constitution of 1920. His influence on Czechoslovakian jurisprudence was exceptional. He advocated the ‘Pure Theory of Law’, demanding that law be studied in a methodologically distinct way, pure of natural-scientific or ideological inputs. He was founder and leader of the ‘Brno School’ of Pure Theory (or ‘Normative Theory’, in his preferred terminology). This school stands close to the Vienna School of Hans Kelsen.
Wróblewski, Jerzy (1926–90)
Authors: Zirk-Sadowski Marek
Published: September 2018

Jerzy Wróblewski was a leading representative of analytical legal theory in Poland in the second half of the twentieth century. Leon Petrażycki and the school of logical thought of Lwów and Warsaw provided his background inspiration. His approach to legal theory and legal science belongs, in philosophical terms, to minimalism, relativism and moderate reconstructivism.
Dworkin, Ronald (1931–2013)
Authors: Christodoulidis Emilios A.
Published: September 2018

Ronald Dworkin’s early, highly controversial, thesis that there are right answers in hard cases in law, coupled with his attack on the idea that law is simply a system of rules, gained him a prominent and distinct place in the anti-positivist strand of legal theory. He has developed and enriched his earlier insights by tying his notion of law-as-interpretation to the ideals of community and equality. Dworkin is an influential representative of liberal thought, who combines clear and analytical thinking with political involvement expressed in decisive and timely interventions in many of the important political debates of our time.
Schmitt, Carl (1888–1985)
Authors: Dyzenhaus David Ludovic
Published: September 2018

Carl Schmitt was a conservative critic of the Weimar Republic’s liberal-democratic constitution. After Hitler’s rise to power, he allied himself briefly to Nazism, and despite having fallen from favour and having revised his position even before the war, was never able to rehabilitate himself from the Nazi taint. Interned at Nuremberg in 1945, he was never brought to trial, but was banned from teaching thereafter. His critique of liberalism lay in liberalism’s alleged inability to deal with the nature of politics. Schmitt continues to exert a vast influence on German public law, legal theory and political philosophy, as well as on European right-wing thought. His work remains important for liberals and opponents of liberalism for the challenges it poses to the neutrality of the liberal state and its legal order.
Law and morality
Authors: Simmonds N.E.
Published: September 2018

Within the tradition of natural law thinking which finds its roots in the philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas, the political community has generally been understood in terms of a fundamental goal: that of fostering the ethical good of citizens. Law, on this conception, should seek to inculcate habits of good conduct, and should support a social environment which will encourage citizens to pursue worthy goals, and to lead valuable lives. Pragmatic considerations may sometimes suggest the wisdom of restraint in the pursuit of these goals, and citizens may therefore, on appropriate occasions, be left free to indulge depraved tastes or otherwise fall short of acceptable standards. Such pragmatic arguments for the freedom to engage in vice, however, do not call into question the legitimacy of the state’s concern with individual morality.

By contrast the liberal tradition has tended to place constraints of principle upon the scope and aims of the law. The most influential such attempt was J.S. Mill’s advocacy of ‘the harm principle’: that the law may forbid only such behaviour as is liable to cause harm to persons other than the agent. Many difficulties surround this and other, more recent, attempts to formulate and defend constraining principles. For instance, should one take into account only the immediate effects of behaviour, or more remote and diffuse effects as well? Thus it is argued that immoral behaviour which in the short term ‘harms nobody’ may, in the long run, lead to a decline in morality in society at large and thereby to diffuse harmful effects.
Beccaria, Cesare Bonesana (1738–94)
Authors: Bellamy Richard
Published: September 2018

Best known for writing Dei Delitti e delle Pene (On Crimes and Punishments), Beccaria was a leading figure of the Milanese Enlightenment who also wrote about political economy and rose to high office in the Lombard administration. His chief work combines contractarian and utilitarian arguments to offer a compromise theory of punishment. According to him, law operates as a sanction to deter harmful behaviour, and should be clear and equal for all. Punishments must be proportionate to the crime whilst preserving the liberty of individuals to pursue their interests to the benefit of themselves and society. He condemned torture and the death penalty for failing to meet these criteria.
Contract law, theories of
Authors: Simmonds N.E.
Published: September 2018

Theories of contract law seek to articulate general principles and values underpinning the complex rules of contract law. Some theorists view contract law as simply concerned to facilitate individual choices and enforce the will of the parties. A rival view holds that it is impossible to derive the content of contract law from such a sparse foundation: contract law is better viewed as one of the instruments whereby the state regulates markets and distributes resources and power. The debate addresses the detailed technicalities of the law, but seeks to relate these technicalities to broader questions of political philosophy.
International law, philosophy of
Authors: Buchanan Allen
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of international law has a long history, reaching back on some accounts beyond the Medieval period to late Hellenistic philosophy. In the twentieth century work in this field was limited, at least among analytic philosophers. From the late 1970s onward, a rich literature developed on global justice, human rights, just war theory, and other key issues of direct relevance to the philosophy of international law, but for the most part it did not directly engage international law or international legal institutions. Quite recently, interest in the philosophy of international law has re-awakened.

The questions the philosophy of international law tries to answer may be divided into two categories: international jurisprudence and the morality of international law. The first includes: (a) is what we call international law really law and if so what makes a norm an international law (as distinct from, say, a political or social norm) and (b) how do we know whether a norm is an international law? International jurisprudence explores fundamental conceptual and epistemic questions about international law, typically with an eye toward determining how and to what extent international law differs from domestic (national) law. The second category encompasses the reasoned moral evaluation of existing international law and legal institutions and principled proposals for reforming them.
Natural law in early modern philosophy
Authors: Heydt Colin
Published: September 2018

Are there moral norms for action applicable in all times and places? It was common in the early modern period to answer ‘Yes’ to this question and to appeal to natural law as expressing those norms.

Natural law developed in the early modern period through the work of Suarez, Grotius, Hobbes, Cumberland and Pufendorf, among others. Natural law is a universal, obligatory set of rules for action, known without revelation and legislated by God. The phrase ‘natural law’ carries with it a set of claims about moral norms – where they originate, what justifies them, how we know them.

Early modern natural law has roots in the ancients (particularly in Stoicism) and Christianity. It is a standard part of medieval and early modern Aristotelian moral philosophy, where it informs discussions of law, moral action, and the Ten Commandments. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, one sees something novel: philosophers claiming that moral philosophy is fundamentally legal or jural or, even more pronounced, nothing other than natural law. On a jural view of morality, moral principles are imposed – in some sense or other – through legislation. It has often been claimed that this marks a break between modern and pre-modern moral philosophies – from views oriented by happiness, good and virtue to views focused on obligation, law, right, duty and authority.

The most important differences between a scholastic or eudaimonistic conception and a natural law or jural conception of moral philosophy arise in claims about the summum bonum (highest good), the emphasis on law, action and justice, and the nature of moral reasons. Perhaps, most generally, natural law can be thought of as reorganizing morality towards the goal of adjudicating conflict, particularly among religious confessions, warring states, traders and alien cultures.

Natural law informed much academic moral philosophy in the eighteenth century and exerted strong influence on moral and political thought (for example, the American Declaration of Independence). By the nineteenth century, however, utilitarian and historicist critics attacked the ideas of morality as law and of timeless, universal norms as constituting morality. In the present day, natural law ideas are manifest in the human rights tradition.
Communication and intention
Authors: Blackburn Simon
Published: September 2018

The classic attempt to understand communication in terms of the intentions of a person making an utterance was put forward by Paul Grice in 1957. Grice was concerned with actions in which a speaker means something by what they do and what is meant might just as much be false as true. He looked for the essence of such cases in actions intended to effect a change in the recipient. Grice saw successful communication as depending on the recognition by the audience of the speaker’s intention. Since then there have been many attempts to refine Grice’s work, and to protect it against various problems. There has also been worry that Grice’s approach depends on a false priority of psychology over semantics, seeing complex psychological states as existing independently of whether the agent has linguistic means of expressing them.
Compositionality
Authors: Richard Mark
Published: September 2018

A language is compositional if the meaning of each of its complex expressions (for example, ‘black dog’) is determined entirely by the meanings its parts (‘black’, ‘dog’) and its syntax. Principles of compositionality provide precise statements of this idea. A compositional semantics for a language is a (finite) theory which explains how semantically important properties such as truth-conditions are determined by the meanings of parts and syntax. Supposing English to have a compositional semantics helps explain how finite creatures like ourselves have the ability to understand English’s infinitely many sentences. Whether human languages are in fact compositional, however, is quite controversial.
Discourse semantics
Authors: Asher Nicholas
Published: September 2018

Discourse and its interpretation have interested philosophers since ancient times, and have been studied in different areas of philosophy such as rhetoric, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of literature. Discourse has attracted interest from philosophers working in the continental tradition, and it received considerable attention in the 1980s from analytic philosophers, philosophers of language, linguists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists; within these fields a formal, logical analysis of discourse interpretation, or discourse semantics, has emerged.

Discourse semantics arose in an attempt to solve certain problems that affected formal theories of meaning for single sentences. These problems had to do with the interpretation of pronouns and other ‘anaphoric’ elements in language. A detailed examination of the data showed that the meaning of an individual sentence in a discourse could depend upon information given by previous sentences in the discourse. To analyse this dependence, discourse semantics developed a formal analysis of a discourse context and of the interaction between the meaning of a sentence and the discourse context in which it is to be interpreted. The essential idea of discourse semantics is that the meaning of a sentence is a relation between contexts. The ‘input’ discourse context furnishes the information needed to interpret the anaphoric elements in the sentence; the information conveyed by the sentence when added to the input context yields a new, or ‘output’, discourse context that can serve to interpret the next sentence in the discourse.
Implicature
Authors: Davis Wayne A.
Published: September 2018

A term used in philosophy, logic and linguistics (especially pragmatics) to denote the act of meaning or implying something by saying something else. A girl who says ‘I have to study’ in response to ‘Can you go to the movies?’ has implicated (the technical verb for making an implicature) that she cannot go. Implicatures may depend on the conversational context, as in this example, or on conventions, as when a speaker says ‘He was clever but poor’, thereby implying – thanks to the conventional usage of the word ‘but’ – that poverty is unexpected given intelligence. Implicature gained importance through the work of H.P. Grice. Grice proposed that conversational implicatures depend on a general principle of rational cooperation stating that people normally try to further the accepted purpose of the conversation by conveying what is true, informative, relevant and perspicuous. The extent and nature of the dependence, and the precise maxims involved, are matters of controversy. Other issues include whether certain implications are implicatures rather than presuppositions or parts of the senses (literal meanings) of the words used.
Language, innateness of
Authors: Cowie Fiona
Published: September 2018

Is there any innate knowledge? What is it to speak and understand a language? These are old questions, but it was the twentieth-century linguist, Noam Chomsky, who forged a connection between them, arguing that mastery of a language is, in part, a matter of knowing its grammar, and that much of our knowledge of grammar is inborn.

Rejecting the empiricism that had dominated Anglo-American philosophy, psychology and linguistics for the first half of this century, Chomsky argued that the task of learning a language is so difficult, and the linguistic evidence available to the learner so meagre, that language acquisition would be impossible unless some of the knowledge eventually attained were innate. He proposed that learners bring to their task knowledge of a ‘Universal Grammar’, describing structural features common to all natural languages, and that it is this knowledge that enables us to master our native tongues.

Chomsky’s position is nativist because it proposes that the inborn knowledge facilitating learning is domain-specific. On an empiricist view, our innate ability to learn from experience (for example, to form associations among ideas) applies equally in any task domain. On the nativist view, by contrast, we are equipped with special-purpose learning strategies, each suited to its own peculiar subject-matter.

Chomsky’s nativism spurred a flurry of interest as theorists leaped to explore its conceptual and empirical implications. As a consequence of his work, language acquisition is today a major focus of cognitive science research.
Scope
Authors: Richard Mark
Published: September 2018

Scope is a notion used by logicians and linguists in describing artificial and natural languages. It is best introduced in terms of the languages of formal logic. Consider a particular occurrence of an operator in a sentence – say, that of ‘→’ in (1) below, or that of the universal quantifier ‘∀’ in (2) below.

- (1) A → (B & C)

- (2) ∀x(Bxy →∃ yAxy)

Speaking intuitively, the scope of the operator is that part of the sentence which it governs. The scope of ‘→’ in (1) is the whole sentence; this renders the whole sentence a conditional. The scope of ‘&’, on the other hand, is just ‘(B & C)’. In (2), the scope of the quantifier ‘∀’ is the whole sentence, which allows it to bind every occurrence of x. The scope of ‘∃’ is only ‘∃yAxy’. Since ‘Bxy’ is outside its scope, the ‘y’ in ‘Bxy’ is left unbound.
Semantics, possible worlds
Authors: Perry John R.
Published: September 2018

Possible worlds semantics (PWS) is a family of ideas and methods that have been used to analyse concepts of philosophical interest. PWS was originally focused on the important concepts of necessity and possibility. Consider:

- Necessarily, 2 + 2 = 4.

- Necessarily, Socrates had a snub nose.

Intuitively, (a) is true but (b) is false. There is simply no way that 2 and 2 can add up to anything but 4, so (a) is true. But although Socrates did in fact have a snub nose, it was not necessary that he did; he might have had a nose of some other shape. So (b) is false.

Sentences (a) and (b) exhibit a characteristic known as intensionality: sentences with the same truth-value are constituent parts of otherwise similar sentences, which nevertheless have different truth-values. Extensional semantics assumed that sentences stand for their truth-values, and that what a sentence stands for is a function of what its constituent parts stand for and how they are arranged. Given these assumptions, it is not easy to explain the difference in truth-value between (a) and (b), and hence not easy to give an account of necessity.

PWS takes a sentence to stand for a function from worlds to truth-values. For each world, the function yields the truth-value the sentence would have if that world were actual. ‘2 + 2 = 4’ stands for a function that yields the truth-value ‘true’ for every world, while ‘Socrates had a snub nose’ stands for a different function that yields ‘true’ for some worlds and ‘false’ for others, depending on what Socrates’ nose is like in the world. Since these two sentences stand for different things, sentences that have them as constituents, such as (a) and (b), can also stand for different things.

This basic idea, borrowed from Leibniz and brought into modern logic by Carnap, Kripke and others, has proven extremely fertile. It has been applied to a number of intensional phenomena in addition to necessity and possibility, including conditionals, tense and temporal adverbs, obligation and reports of informational and cognitive content. PWS spurred the development of philosophical logic and led to new applications of logic in computer science and artificial intelligence. It revolutionized the study of the semantics of natural languages. PWS has inspired analyses of many concepts of philosophical importance, and the concept of a possible world has been at the heart of important philosophical systems.
Structuralism in linguistics
Authors: Holdcroft David
Published: September 2018

The term structural linguistics can be used to refer to two movements which developed independently of each other. The first is European and can be characterized as post-Saussurean, since Saussure is generally regarded as its inspiration. The central claim of this movement is that terms of a language of all kinds (sounds, words, meanings) present themselves in Saussure’s phrase ‘as a system’, and can only be identified by describing their relations to other terms of the same language; one cannot first identify the terms of a language and then ask which system they belong to. Moreover, because a language is a system of signs, one cannot identify expression-elements (sounds, words) independently of the content-elements (meanings), so that a study of language cannot be divorced from one of meaning. The second movement is an American one, which developed from the work of Leonard Bloomfield and dominated American linguistics in the 1940s and 1950s. It attached great importance to methodological rigour and, influenced by behaviourist psychology, was hostile to mentalism (any theory which posits an independent category of mental events and processes). As a result, unlike the first movement, it excluded the study of meaning from that of grammar, and tried to develop a methodology to describe any corpus in terms of the distribution of its expression-elements relative to each other. Whereas the first movement provided a model for structuralist thought in general, and had a significant impact on such thinkers as Barthes, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, the second made a major contribution to the development of formal models of language, however inadequate they may seem now in the light of Chomsky’s criticisms.
Mauthner, Fritz (1849–1923)
Authors: Bredeck Elizabeth
Published: September 2018

The work of Fritz Mauthner helps document the phenomenon of ‘language crisis’ or Sprachkrise in German-Austrian letters at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language) (1901–2), Mauthner develops a theory of knowledge that draws on empiricism but also redefines certain basic concepts in terms of language. ‘Language’ refers to more than speech; it is the medium of all cognition and, as such, an instrument of knowledge. Mauthner’s reformulation of epistemological questions in linguistic terms does more than replace one topic with another. When language becomes the focus of philosophical debate, the debate cannot help but involve a discussion of the nature and limits of the discussion itself. As epistemology or theory of knowledge gives way to critique of language, it spells the end of philosophy as a foundational discourse for the human sciences.
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913)
Authors: Holdcroft David
Published: September 2018

Though he made a major contribution to the comparative and historical studies which dominated nineteenth-century linguistics, Saussure is best known today for the development of a radically different conception of language and of the methodology of linguistics which became central to twentieth-century structural linguistics. According to this conception a language is a system of signs which are radically arbitrary, so that their significations are determined only by the historically constituted systems of conventions to which they belong – such a system Saussure called ‘la langue‘. It follows, therefore, that a linguistic study is first and foremost one of la langue, that is, of the conventional relations obtaining at a given time between signs belonging to the same system, rather than one of the development of linguistic forms over time, as the comparativists had maintained.
Semantics, game-theoretic
Authors: Hand Michael
Published: September 2018

Game-theoretic semantics (GTS) uses concepts from game theory to study how the truth and falsity of the sentences of a language depend upon the truth and falsity of the language’s atomic sentences (or upon its sub-sentential expressions). Unlike the Tarskian method (which uses recursion clauses to determine satisfaction conditions for nonatomic sentences in terms of the satisfaction conditions of their component sentences, then defines truth in terms of satisfaction), GTS associates with each sentence its own semantic game played on sentences of the language. This game defines truth in terms of the existence of a winning strategy for one of the players involved. The structure of the game is determined by the sentence’s structure, and thus the semantic properties of the sentence in question can be studied by attending to the properties of its game.
Semiotics
Authors: Watt W.C.
Published: September 2018

As the study of signification, semiotics takes as its central task that of describing how one thing can mean another. Alternatively, since this philosophical problem is also a psychological one, its job could be said to be that of describing how one thing can bring something else to mind, how on seeing ’x’ someone can be induced to think about ’y’ even though ’y’ is absent.

A person in whose head ’y’ has been brought to mind may be responding to an ’x’ someone else has transmitted with the intention of its signifying ’y’; or, mistakenly, responding to an ’x’ someone has transmitted in the guileless expectation of its signifying some ’z’; or, often, responding to an ’x’ that comes to his notice without anybody’s apparent intention at all. Words, for example, generally signify because someone intends them to, and ideally (though not always) they signify what is intended; whereas clouds signify – a coming storm, a whale – because we so interpret them, not because they shaped themselves to convey some meaning.

Obviously the study of signification forms an integral part of the study of thinking, since no object can itself enter the brain, barring fatal mischance, and so it must be represented by some mental (that is, neural) ’x’ that signifies it.

Signifiers are equally essential for creatures far lower than humans, as when a chemical signal ’x’ emitted by some bacterium signifies to one of its colleagues some ‘y’ such as ’there’s a dearth of food hereabouts’.

There are a number of ways in which an ’x’ can signify some ’y’, but for humans these are chiefly: by physical association; by physical resemblance; and/or by arbitrary convention.

When we take some ’x’ as signifying some ‘y’ we are often guessing; our guess is subject to checking by interpretative (re)appraisal.
Davidson, Donald (1917–2003)
Authors: Lepore Ernie
Published: September 2018

Donald Davidson’s views about the relationship between our conceptions of ourselves as people and as complex physical objects have had significant impact on contemporary discussions of such topics as intention, action, causal explanation and weakness of the will. His collection of essays, Actions and Events (1980), contains many seminal contributions in these areas. But perhaps even greater has been the influence of Davidson’s philosophy of language, as reflected especially in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984). Among the philosophical issues connected to language on which Davidson has been influential are the nature of truth, the semantic paradoxes, first person authority, indexicals, modality, reference, quotation, metaphor, indeterminacy, convention, realism and the publicity of language.
Davidson, Donald (1917–2003)
Authors: Lepore Ernie , Malpas Jeff
Published: September 2018

Donald Davidson is a central figure in twentieth-century American philosophy. Of the five volumes that make up Davidson’s collected essays, the best known are the first two, Essays on Actions and Events (2001a [1980]) and Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (2001b [1984]), which draw together his work from the 1960s and 1970s, and include many seminal contributions to the philosophy of action, mind, and language. Davidson’s later writings, from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, are less well-known in their entirety, but also include many significant and influential essays particularly on questions of truth and knowledge, as well as on content and the mind. Of these three later volumes, the most important is undoubtedly Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (2001c), in which Davidson’s commitment to a holistic or ‘relational’ view of the mind – a view that also sees the mind as necessarily implicated with and implicating other minds and the world – appears in its most explicit form. Problems of Rationality (2004) and Truth, Language and History (2005a) were published posthumously, along with Truth and Predication (2005b), the latter being Davidson’s only published monograph. Influential on an entire generation of philosophers, Davidson opened up new approaches to the study of intention, action, causal explanation, rationality and irrationality, the nature of truth and knowledge, first person authority, indexicals, modality, reference, quotation, metaphor, indeterminacy, convention, realism and the publicity of language. Although connecting with core issues in analytic philosophy, Davidson’s work has also been seen as having close affinities with important aspects of hermeneutic, deconstructionist, and pragmatist thinking.
Mental states, adverbial theory of
Authors: Tye Michael
Published: September 2018

According to the adverbial theory, there are no mental objects of experience, no pains, itches, tickles, after-images, appearances. People certainly feel pains and have after-images; external objects certainly present appearances to people viewing them. But pains, after-images, and appearances are not real things. Statements which purport to be about such mental objects have a misleading grammatical form. In reality, such statements are about the ways in which people experience or sense or feel.
Akrasia
Authors: Steward Helen
Published: September 2018

The Greek word ‘akrasia’ is usually said to translate literally as ‘lack of self-control’, but it has come to be used as a general term for the phenomenon known as weakness of will, or incontinence, the disposition to act contrary to one’s own considered judgment about what it is best to do. Since one variety of akrasia is the inability to act as one thinks right, akrasia is obviously important to the moral philosopher, but it is also frequently discussed in the context of philosophy of action. Akrasia is of interest to philosophers of action because although it seems clear that it does occur – that people often do act in ways which they believe to be contrary to their own best interests, moral principles or long-term goals – it also seems to follow from certain apparently plausible views about intentional action that akrasia is simply not possible. A famous version of the suggestion that genuine akrasia cannot exist is found in Socrates, as portrayed by Plato in the Protagoras. Socrates argues that it is impossible for a person’s knowledge of what is best to be overcome by such things as the desire for pleasure – that one cannot choose a course of action which one knows full well to be less good than some alternative known to be available. Anyone who chooses to do something which is in fact worse than something they know they could have done instead, must, according to Socrates, have wrongly judged the relative values of the actions.
Behaviourism, analytic
Authors: Braddon-Mitchell David
Published: September 2018

Analytical behaviourism is the doctrine that talk about mental phenomena is really talk about behaviour, or tendencies to behave. For an analytical behaviourist, to say that Janet desires ice cream is to say that, all things being equal, she tends to seek it out. To say that Brad is now feeling jealous is to say no more than that he is now behaving in a way characteristic of jealousy, or perhaps that he would do so under appropriate provocation. Analytical behaviourism differs from methodological behaviourism in insisting that our ordinary use of mental language really is, in some sense, already about behaviour. The methodological version claims either that in doing psychology we should restrict ourselves to notions which can be defined behaviourally, or, sometimes, that our general psychological language, even if not already definable in this way, should be reformed in this general direction.

The most telling objection to this account of the mind is that it is inconsistent with the requirement that mental states are causes of behaviour. Ordinarily we might note that Brad has a tendency to display jealous behaviour with little provocation, and conjecture that this is caused by his feeling jealous (rather than, say, practising for his forthcoming part in a Jacobean tragedy). But according to analytical behaviourism his feeling jealous just is his tendency to the behaviour, and since nothing causes itself, his jealousy cannot be the cause of the pattern of behaviour.