bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Fuzzy trace theory
Authors: Helm Rebecca K. , Reyna Valerie F.
Published: April 2023

Fuzzy trace theory (FTT) is a dual-process theory of memory and decision-making that distinguishes two types of mental representations—gist and verbatim—which are encoded simultaneously. These representations have different characteristics; the representation relied on when making decisions influences the way that decisions are made. Through distinguishing gist and verbatim representations, FTT explains known effects, but it also predicts novel and counterintuitive effects, such as developmental reversals when children are less susceptible to spontaneous false memories or to irrational decision biases, compared with adults. Understanding these effects, and how they occur under predictable conditions, is important in informing practice and policy. Such understanding mitigates against weaknesses in policy based on ‘common sense’ rather than evidence and provides insight into both whether and how policy change is likely to have an effect. To facilitate this understanding, this chapter introduces basic precepts of FTT and supporting research. It then shows how these findings have important applications and implications for policy. The chapter focuses on the following areas: insight into mechanisms behind false memory that can inform policy relating to witness memory in the legal system, as well as jury decision-making; insight into the evaluation of evidence that can inform the presentation of medical information and reduce the impact of fake health news; and insight into risky decision-making that can inform policy seeking to reduce unhealthy and illegal risky behaviours and to ensure that decisions to plead guilty or go to trial in the criminal justice system are made for reasons that are normatively acceptable.
Working memory in action
Authors: Allen Richard J , Waterman Amanda H. , Yang Tian-xiao , Graham Agnieszka J.
Published: April 2023

Working memory as a field of research has long been characterized by productive development at both theoretical and practical levels. The multicomponent approach developed by Alan Baddeley and colleagues continues to be a driving force in each of these regards. One recent example of this is the question of how instructions and actions might be encoded and temporarily retained in working memory. This is an important real-world ability that also offers complex challenges for theoretical interpretation. Strides have previously been made in understanding how action might impact long-term memory, but this had remained a relatively underexplored topic in the context of working memory. Motivated in part by the observation that children with poor working memory seem to struggle with classroom instruction, the last 15 years has seen the development of a new literature on working memory for action and instruction exploring the possible cognitive mechanisms underpinning this ability and how it might change across task contexts and populations. This work has started to map out some of the factors that determine successful recall and implementation of instruction sequences. Among a range of findings, it is emerging that incorporating action either through anticipated, observed, enacted, or imagined performance can substantially increase the likelihood of successful task completion. Such outcomes have been observed in healthy young adults and, with certain important constraints, in individuals with relatively reduced working memory capacity (e.g. typical children and older adults, and clinical populations such as children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and older adults with dementia). This chapter reviews the current state of play, considers theoretical interpretation and practical application, and suggests where this emerging field of research might go next.
Actuality Inferences
Authors: Nadathur Prerna
Published: April 2023

Expressions of ability exhibit a curious ambiguity, sometimes describing the potential actions of an agent, and in others simply what the agent did on a particular occasion. In aspect-marking languages, the ambiguity extends to abilitative uses of the possibility modal and is governed by aspectual marking, so that imperfective ability takes a pure, potentially unrealized interpretation, but perfective ability gives rise to an actuality entailment, requiring the realisation of the modal complement. Actuality entailments have resisted explanation on approaches which seek to derive them in the composition of modality and aspect. This book lays the groundwork for an account that links both ability and actuality to a novel component in the semantics of ability: causal dependence. On the approach proposed here, ability modals describe a complex causal structure, in which some potential action for an agent is taken to be causally necessary and causally sufficient for the realisation of the modal complement. The proposal is developed by comparing the inferential profile of ability modals to that of complement-entailing implicative verbs (e.g., manage), and aspect-sensitive enough/too predicates (e.g., be fast enough): the predicates types are unified by a shared causal background, but differ with respect in asserted content. Where implicative verbs assert the realisation of their complements’ causing conditions, ability and enough/too predicates simply establish the stative potential for their agents to take causing action. This asserted content interacts with a selective perfective aspect to trigger operations of aspectual coercion, resulting in the aspect-sensitive inferential profile of ability ascriptions. The book offers a new perspective on the role of causal dependence in lexical and compositional semantics, and contributes to the development of a growing research program which uses formal, computational causal models as a tool for semantic analysis and explication.
Causal dependence in implicative inferences
Authors: Nadathur Prerna
Published: April 2023

This chapter pursues a deeper understanding of actualized interpretations for ability ascriptions by examining a closely related set of inferences, from complement-entailing implicative verbs (e.g., manage) in English and Finnish. It introduces arguments for treating actuality entailments as compositionally-derived cases of implicativity, and uses this discussion to motivate a new approach to the lexical semantics of implicative verbs. The bulk of the chapter develops an account of implicative semantics on which their characteristic complement entailments follow from causal dependence relations embedded in their lexical semantics; en route to developing this analysis, it introduces the formal framework for causal models which will be employed in the rest of the book. The chapter concludes by examining the ‘implicative’ outlook for ability ascriptions, and motivates an examination of variably-implicative enough/too constructions.
Variable implicativity inenoughandtooconstructions
Authors: Nadathur Prerna
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines the empirical distribution of implicative inferences for enough/too predicates (e.g., be fast enough to, be too old to) in English and French. It establishes the parameters which must co-occur for enough/too constructions to produce (aspect-sensitive) complement inferences, and argues that these parameters conspire to produce the same complex causal structure which leads to the complement entailments of lexical implicative verbs.
Aspect and actuality inferences
Authors: Nadathur Prerna
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines the interaction between grammatical aspect and aspectual class, developing a theory of aspectual composition on which ‘mismatches’ between the selectional restriction of grammatical aspects and the aspectual class features of input eventuality predicates can trigger ‘repair’ operations of aspectual coercion, reshaping aspects of the underlying predicate of eventualities. It argues that dynamic capacity predicates (e.g., be fast) are subject to an understudied form of aspectual coercion, termed here instantiative, and offers a characterization and formal description of the effect of this operation. The chapter demonstrates that instantiative coercion converts latent capacity attributions into eventive manifestations of the properties they describe, and shows that this combines with the underlying causal structure of dynamic circumstantial enough/too predicates to produce the empirically-observed, aspect-driven pattern of complement entailment.
Conclusion
Authors: Nadathur Prerna
Published: April 2023

This chapter summarises the full investigation, and discusses the answers that have been provided over the course of the book for the three framing questions in Chapter 1. It offers a broader perspective on the role of causal structure in the analysis of linguistic inference, and suggests some avenues for developing an exploration of the connections between causal structure and the (linguistic) conceptualization of agency and agentivity.
The Doctrine of Precedent and the Rule of Recognition
Authors: Lamond Grant
Published: April 2023

The first part of this chapter highlights two aspects of the doctrine of precedent as it is understood by common lawyers: the law-creating nature of judicial decisions and the ways in which precedents bind courts. The second, longer, part of the chapter considers whether the doctrine can be given a satisfactory philosophical analysis in terms of Hart’s rule of recognition, and what light the doctrine sheds on the rule of recognition itself. It defends the view that the law-creating aspect of precedent can be explained in terms of criteria in the rule of recognition against claims that there is too much disagreement over the criteria for this conception to be plausible. It goes on to argue that the rule of recognition is not simply a social rule of officials but a customary law of the system, and a detailed account of such customary law is proposed. Finally, it suggests that the existence of other customary laws that do not owe their existence to the rule of recognition militates against the idea that every legal system necessarily has just one (often highly complex) rule of recognition. Instead, legal systems contain as many rules of recognition as there are ultimate sources of law.
Precedent and Paradigm
Authors: Trueblood Leah , Hatfield Peter
Published: April 2023

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn uses an analogy with the common law to help explain the nature of scientific progress. He says, ‘In science … a paradigm is rarely an object for replication. Instead, like an accepted judicial decision in the common law, it is an object for further articulation and specification under new or more stringent conditions.’ This chapter argues that this analogy is helpful for three reasons. First, it offers a useful—although non-exhaustive—definition of precedent. Secondly, Kuhn’s account helps to explain when and why precedents must be overturned. This is not because precedents are ‘mistaken’ exactly but rather because, as in science, ‘malfunctions’ arise in the process of solving legal problems. Kuhn’s theory explains the two types of change which are necessary for the common law to progress: cumulative and paradigmatic. Thirdly and finally, Kuhn’s analogy shows that, while progress in the law is not linear, this complexity is to the law’s advantage. Sometimes it is necessary, and even helpful, for the common law to move backwards to move forwards.
Analogical Reasoning and Precedent
Authors: Sunstein Cass R
Published: April 2023

This chapter explains that, in law, the process of analogical reasoning appears to work in five simple steps. (1) Some fact pattern A—the ‘source’ case—has certain characteristics; call them X, Y, and Z. (2) Fact pattern B—the ‘target’ case—has characteristics X, Y, and Q, or characteristics X, Y, Z, and Q. (3) A is treated a certain way in law. (4) Some principle or rule, announced, created, or discovered in the process of thinking through A, B, and their interrelations, explains why A is treated the way that it is. (5) Because of what it shares in common with A, B should be treated the same way. It is covered by the same principle. It should be clear that the crucial step, and the most difficult, is (4). Often analogical reasoning works through the use of incompletely theorized agreements, making (4) tractable. Some of the disputes about analogical reasoning reflect contests between Burkean and Benthamite conceptions of law.
Precedent and Law-Making Powers
Authors: Barczentewicz Mikołaj
Published: April 2023

This chapter provides a critical overview of the debate on the relationship between precedent making and exercises of a particular kind of legal powers: law-making powers. In doing so, it challenges some common claims about the courts (necessarily) having law-making powers. The chapter discusses what is common among the major general accounts of legal powers and shows the role of intentions and of volitional control of power holders. Those aspects have consequences for what kind of judge-lead legal change should be viewed as an exercise of a legal power specifically to make (change) the law. This is particularly salient in cases of ‘unprecedent’ (where a court tries to avoid setting a precedent) and to situations where court-led legal change becomes effective through a mechanism akin to custom than to legislating. Moreover, the chapter discusses the question of the tension between the official stories (ideologies) of legal systems and second-order (e.g. academic) accounts on the issue of judicial powers to make the law. It argues that one should not be too quick to dismiss the law’s official claim that judges do not have a power to make the law.
Constitutionally Erroneous Precedent as a Window on Judicial Law-Making in the US Legal System
Authors: Fallon Richard H
Published: April 2023

This chapter probes the doctrine of stare decisis as it functions in constitutional cases in the Supreme Court of the US. It solves what some have viewed as two puzzles about constitutional stare decisis in the US. One involves how past decisions that the justices believe to be erroneous can displace the original meaning of a constitution that purports to be ‘the supreme law of the land’. The other mystery is how it can be that if erroneous precedents sometimes prevail over the US Constitution’s original meaning, they do not always do so. In response to the first puzzle, this chapter appeals to the Hartian concept of a ‘rule of recognition’, grounded in official practice and ‘acceptance’. In addressing the second puzzle, this chapter relies on Hart’s distinction between rules of recognition and ‘rules of change’. In the Supreme Court, the chapter argues, an important practical function of the doctrine of stare decisis is to empower the justices to act as constitutional law-makers choosing whether to effect or not to effect legal change. In addition to clarifying the role of constitutional stare decisis in the Supreme Court, this chapter seeks to advance understanding of possible variations in the functioning of stare decisis in different legal systems and of Hartian jurisprudential concepts, including those of rules of recognition and rules of change.
Hoary Precedents
Authors: Kramer Matthew H
Published: April 2023

Hoary precedents are rulings or sets of rulings which were issued by courts many decades ago and have never been overturned subsequently. Can it ever be the case that a hoary precedent, invoked as legally binding by judges and other legal-governmental officials in numerous contexts, is not in fact legally binding? This chapter will argue that the answer to such a question is affirmative, and that the affirmative answer is entirely consistent with the resistance of legal positivists to the proposition that law is an inherently moral phenomenon. That affirmative answer will be reached through some reflections on the metaphysics of legal objectivity.
Urban Warfare
Authors: Weissmann Mikael
Published: April 2023

It is often said that future combat will take place in urban areas, including megacities, and preparing for urban warfare has become a necessity. Whilst urban warfare in itself is nothing new, urbanization and new technology are inexorably forcing battles to move to urban areas to a larger extent than ever before. The chapter outlines key challenges and expectations for urban operations on today’s and tomorrow’s battlefield—urbanization, multi-domain operations, grey zone problems, technology, and the urbanization of insurgency—and outlines ways to handle them including outlining best practices and available tools. It is found that not only does the future of warfare lie in urban areas but in today’s interconnected world, with the information sphere becoming the centre of gravity, the urban battlefield reaches far beyond the city limits. Finally, eleven takeaways about urban warfare are drawn up.
The Typological Diversity of Morphomes
Authors: Herce Borja
Published: April 2023

This book constitutes the first typologically oriented monograph on morphomes, which is the term given to systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes like ‘plural’, ‘past’, ‘third-person singular’. Its first half addresses the theoretical and empirical challenges surrounding the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with related notions like syncretism, homophony, blocking, segmentation, economy, morphophonology, etc. It also presents the different ways in which morphomic structures have been observed to emerge, change, and disappear from a language. The second part of the book contains its core contribution: a database with 120 morphomes across 79 languages from all around the world. These structures are first presented in painstaking philological detail, and then deconstructed into logically independent axes of variation, identified in the spirit of Multivariate Typology. Statistical analysis is then undertaken to spot trends and correlations which are subsequently discussed. Various findings, relevant to both proponents and detractors of Autonomous Morphology, have emerged regarding, for example, the idiosyncratic (i.e. not representative) nature of Romance morphomes, the existence of cross-linguistically recurrent unnatural patterns, and the preference for more natural structures even among morphomes. The database is also expected to allow explorations of other issues, such as how learnability and communicative efficiency pressures impact morphological structure, and lexical and grammatical informativity across the word.
PNI-property II: Lack of binding and control
Authors: Driemel Imke
Published: April 2023

Since the scope diagnostic does not apply to all noun types which can optionally be case-marked in the languages of this study, we extend the investigation by two additional diagnostics, which are discussed in detail in this chapter. Bare nouns are taken as the baseline in each pseudo-incorporation language, which are consistently shown to not be able to act as binders or controllers. These tests are employed to probe for the PNI status of the rest of the noun types, specifically those for which scope tests are unavailable, for example demonstrative phrases and weak definites. The inability to bind or control into a clause is explained by the fact that binding is a nominal property, thus not available pseudo-incorporated nouns. One way to implement this assumption is by restricting the insertion of a binder prefix to nominal categories, which is spelled out in this chapter.
PNI-property III: Movement patterns
Authors: Driemel Imke
Published: April 2023

The final diagnostic discussed in this book is movement, which is the focus of this chapter. It will be shown that restrictions to the movement capacity of pseudo-incorporated arguments are by no means uniform across languages. Whereas Mongolian and Tamil display complete immobility of PNI-ed arguments, Korean allows for clause-internal but not long scrambling. Turkish allows for short, intermediate, and long scrambling. Identical observations hold for VP-movement in the languages, respectively. The parallelism of PNI and VP movement can be most clearly shown with German, a language which, although not allowing case drop, has been argued to pseudo-incorporate bare plurals and non-specific indefinites. PNI-ed arguments do not scramble, yet they can undergo topicalization - the identical movement patterns are observed for VPs in German. The account is implemented within phase theory, where scrambling and topicalization is triggered by category sensitive probe features.
Introduction
Authors: Rappoport Jill
Published: April 2023

The Introduction uses novels by Jane Austen to set up the book’s argument that critical focus on marriage and law has obscured other economic relations and customs important to women’s financial agency. It also demonstrates how debates about women’s rights relied on different representational strategies during this earlier period and in later decades of property reform. Early nineteenth-century novels such as Austen’s tend to suggest that fathers and inheritance practices are as much to blame as marriage for women’s economic disadvantages, aligning coverture (the common law doctrine that marriage voided a woman’s legal identity) with primogeniture (the consolidation of wealth among eldest sons). This earlier view of women’s marginalization allows us to see the discursive shift that occurs around the Victorian reform of women’s property law, when fiction written after the 1870 Act begins to pit the economic rights of wives against those of sons. Celebrating primogeniture even as they acknowledge problems within marital structures, novels from this later period strike back at women’s growing economic rights by suggesting that their claims will threaten “family property” and that “good mothers” should willingly cede those claims to their children.
“How Can Money Be a Corpse’s?”
Authors: Rappoport Jill
Published: April 2023

In Our Mutual Friend, John Harmon’s infamous will, which makes his son’s inheritance contingent on marriage to a woman he has never met, showcases the economic dispossession of middle-class women in the 1860s. But is also central to a different economic problem—the failure of written documents to distribute property. Willed property proves to be little more than a fiction in a novel that questions the posthumous power any author can have over his or her writing (whether as property or regarding property). Dickens thus imagines extralegal ways to push beyond the limits of legal ownership, using female characters both to restore Harmon’s estate and to protect a woman’s burial wishes. Ultimately, he attempts to resolve a crisis in gendered and authorial property rights through collaborative exchanges, granting working-class women greater economic roles and testamentary rights in the service of securing the fantasy of stable authorship, patrilineal property, and more reliably directed legacies.
Greed, Generosity, and Other Problems with Unmarried Women’s Property
Authors: Rappoport Jill
Published: April 2023

Chapter 3 focuses on the property problems of four unmarried female characters. Alongside Anthony Trollope’s general sympathy for women’s legal position, his acknowledgment of their financial capabilities, and his unusual tendency to depict wealthy female characters, these novels’ unusually punitive plotlines suggest the threat that single women’s independent economic actions might pose to established family structures and financial traditions. Whether these women are condemned as “blood-sucking harpies” for being “generous as the sun,” their greed and generosity present equal dangers to these novels’ social worlds because they obstruct customary forms of property transmission. By challenging principles of inheritance and heterosexual exchange, injuring the very families they claim to help, and creating unacceptable burdens for their male kin, these characters underscore contemporary fears and fantasies about the intrafamilial stakes of women’s financial choices and also showcase the contested roles of female custodians and creditors that became salient during a time of increased agitation for married women’s property rights.
Essential Statistics for Data Science
Authors: Zhu Mu
Published: April 2023

Essential Statistics for Data Science is a very short crash course for students entering a serious graduate program in data science without knowing enough statistics. However, it is not the type of introductory course that simply teaches students how to plug numbers into a formula and perform a t-test. While the course does start from the basics of probability and random variables, it moves along rapidly and ambitiously takes students in a matter of weeks to a number of relatively advanced topics in both frequentist and Bayesian inference as well as uncertainty assessment—such as the EM algorithm, the Gibbs sampler, and the bootstrap. The “main plot” unfolds in three parts. Part I, Talking Probability: The statistical approach to analysing data begins with a probability model to describe the data generating process; that's why, to study statistics, one must first learn to speak the language of probability. Part II, Doing Statistics: Before a model becomes truly useful, one must learn something about the unknown quantities in it—e.g., its parameters—from the data it is presumed to have generated, whether one cares about the parameters themselves or not; that's what much of statistical inference is about. Part III, Facing Uncertainty: Although one usually does not care much about parameters that don't have intrinsic scientific meaning, for those that do, it is important to explicitly describe how much uncertainty we have about them and take that into account when making decisions.
The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Politics of Technocratic Economic Governance
Authors: Clift Ben
Published: April 2023

This book is about the politics of economic ideas, and the inevitable yet hidden politics of technocratic economic governance, explored through a focus on the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)—the institution designed to oversee Britain’s fiscal policy. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative analysis of official documents and interviews with professional economists and technocrats, the book develops the politics of economic method lens to shed new light on the judgement and discretion inherent in interpreting economic ideas in practice. This analysis reveals the OBR’s remit of objective distance from the political fray to be grounded in a false premise. Despite appeals to independent and ‘scientific’ economic expertise, there is always a politics of economic policy, embodied in how technocratic governance institutions are created, and how they choose to examine and narrate the economy. Economic models and discourses are socially constructed, reproducing and reimagining knowledge about an economy’s trajectory, and how it should be studied and managed. The book interrogates the broader backdrop against which such deliberations take place, exploring the twenty-first-century evolution of macroeconomic orthodoxy and the British model of capitalism. It engages three ‘once in a century’ shocks, analysing British capitalism’s uncertain trajectory as policymakers navigated the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and the upheavals of Brexit and COVID. By delineating competing constructions of economic reason and showing how they underpin models of British capitalism, growth, and crisis response, the book provides an indispensable account of the politics of technocracy, and of Britain’s contemporary political economy.
Embattled Technocratic Governance
Authors: Clift Ben
Published: April 2023

This chapter introduces the book’s focus on the construction of economic reason and the politics of technocratic economic governance. It establishes how seemingly objective economic concepts and methods, used by technocratic governance bodies like the Office for Budget Responsibility to gauge economic growth trajectories and policy effects, are political constructions founded on contestable normative assumptions. It illustrates how studying the OBR provides a window onto the technocratic world of economic expertise and unpacks how the neoliberal idea of an apolitical fiscal policy process is an illusion. The lens of the OBR is used to explore tensions between national sovereignty and global markets, and the broader politics and political economy of Britain’s growth trajectory, the British model of capitalism, and Britain’s place within world order. It charts the seismic upheavals of the Global Financial Crisis, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, and the atypical politics of British economic policy in the context of Brexit. In doing so, it speaks to broader debates about populism and ‘post-truth’ politics, and assesses the impact of these movements on technocratic economic governance.
Conclusion
Authors: Clift Ben
Published: April 2023

This concluding chapter recaps the book’s core themes, distilling the politics of technocratic economic governance and illuminating the value of a politics of economic method lens for exploring political contestation over economic ideas and how they are used in practice by the experts charged with pronouncing on the economy’s health. It lays out how the OBR’s narrating the economy entails the social construction of sound fiscal policy, reflecting on how economic and fiscal orthodoxy is a contingent historical phenomenon. It questions the possibility of fiscal oversight at the non-normative end of the spectrum, and revisits tensions between British politics and Europe in terms of the paradox of neoliberal democracy. Considering the enduring appeal of technocratic economic governance, discussion assesses future challenges for the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), notably those posed by Britain’s recent democratic deterioration eroding parliamentary and judicial accountability of the executive. The impunity, serial lying, and law-breaking of the British government encouraged under Boris Johnson made it harder for independent oversight bodies like the OBR to hold government fiscal policy to account. With the dawn of ‘post-truth’ politics, the sinews linking the doctrine underpinning economic policymaking to fact, evidence, economic reason, and logic became much more elastic. This is a challenging environment for technocratic economic governance institutions to execute their oversight mandates and render economic policy choices more accountable. Finally, it considers how technocratic economic governance and economic forecasting can respond to the additional uncertainties and non-linear dynamics of the major public policy challenge of the twenty-first century—the climate crisis.
Witness-based quantification
Authors: Cooper Robin
Published: April 2023

This chapter looks at generalized quantifiers from the perspective of dialogic interaction. Traditionally generalized quantifiers are treated as sets of sets or sets of properties. Barwise and Cooper also introduced the auxiliary notion of witness set for quantifiers under the heading “Processing quantified statements”. This chapter turns things around and make the characterization of witness sets the primary notion in defining quantifiers. This makes it more straightforward to account for the anaphoric possibilities relating to quantified expressions in dialogue. We often use quantified statements in dialogue when we have inadequate information to determine their truth. This is particularly true of determiners like every and most when talking about large sets. We suggest that this phenomenon can be analyzed by estimating a probability based on the evidence presented in our cognitive resources (long-term memory or beliefs as discussed in Chapters 4 and 6).
The Black Swan of Chalcedon and Dioscorus’ Deposition
Authors: Menze Volker L.
Published: April 2023

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 is accepted as the fourth ecumenical council in the western church traditions. It is usually regarded as rectifying the misdeeds of the Second Council of Ephesus, the ‘robber-council’ which took place two years earlier. But the chapter shows that the council was procedurally hardly any better handled than the ‘robber-council’. The first session might look like a heresy trial of Dioscorus at first sight but it is rather a very confused appeal hearing. The order of the following sessions has been much debated, but the present chapter offers a new hypothesis that fits the evidence better than previous reconstructions. In the third session Dioscorus was deposed—not condemned as it can still sometimes be found in the literature. Although Pope Leo and a few other dyophysites might have really regarded him as a heretic, he was deposed because a scapegoat was needed for the Second Council of Ephesus. Emperor Theodosius who had largely been responsible for the procedural framework could not be accused so that Dioscorus as former president of the council was the obvious choice. Against major resistance, the Council also endorsed Leo’s Tome and issued a dyophysite formula of faith. With Dioscorus’ deposition, the post-Chalcedonian quarrels started which were going to last until the seventh century.
Institutionalizing the Duty to Rescue in a Global Health Emergency
Authors: Buchanan Allen
Published: April 2023

This chapter argues that the moral underperformance of wealthy states and pharmaceutical companies in the current pandemic is a predictable result of an institutional failure: the lack of a well-designed international institution that would “perfect” imperfect duties to prevent and mitigate harm to distant strangers. Wealthy states and pharmaceutical companies have publicly acknowledged that they ought to do something to aid pandemic responses in less wealthy countries, for example by supplying vaccines and ventilators, but for the most part their efforts have been meager and uncoordinated. The problem is that imperfect duties are indeterminate as to exactly what the duty-bearer is required to do. The solution is to develop an international institution that would clearly identify duty-bearers and recipients of aid, specify the content of the duties, achieve a fair distribution of the costs of fulfilling the duties, and supply effective mechanisms for compliance with the assigned duties.
Fair Distribution of Burdens and Vulnerable Groups with Physical Distancing during a Pandemic
Authors: Nakazawa Eisuke , Akabayashi Akira
Published: April 2023

Social disparities became apparent in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic. Physical distancing policy to control spread of infection was effective, but it caused social distancing, especially among older people and foreigners. The physical distancing policy reduced opportunities for older people to go out. The most tragic consequence of social isolation among older people is the increase in solitary death. Foreign students, foreign technical intern trainees, and unauthorized immigrants lost much of their freedom of movement and economic activities. Vulnerable foreigners experienced deterioration in health due to economic and linguistic restrictions. There is a trade-off between guaranteeing individual freedom of action and promoting the public good through the control of infectious diseases. Blanket policies that do not consider diversity of behaviors and social circumstances should be reconsidered. Information on public health policies must be of higher quality and customized to accommodate the learning capabilities of the general populace. This chapter proposes three innovations: minimal restrictions, providing appropriate information, and providing communication tools. These need to be brought to bear on policies considered in the context of tension between respect for individual freedom of action, the intrinsic value of in-person communication, and the promotion of social good for the control of infectious diseases. Since the trade-off is essential, it also appears in the Disease X that we face in the future. The chapter points out that policymakers need to adjust the conflict in accordance with the principles of justice to protect the socially vulnerable.
Driving Digital Transformation
Authors: Ndulu Benno , Stuart Elizabeth , Dercon Stefan , Knaack Peter
Published: April 2023

This book traces the experience of digital economic transformation in seven developing countries, providing insights for policymakers and practitioners in similar situations as well as lessons for outsiders trying to support government reform efforts more broadly. In one country, the prime minister pushes for the liberalization of digital finance as a central pillar of the country’s national strategy, while the central bank almost makes it a criminal offence. In another, the digital minister tries to scupper the very process to support digital transformation that the president has asked them to co-lead. This book gives a ringside seat on seven developing countries’ tumultuous early steps on the path to a reform of the economy and the government using technology. Written by a group of academics and practitioners from Oxford at the heart of the process, but foregrounding the voices of the policymakers and participants, this book documents and critically assesses efforts to assist a set of governments to kick-start digital transformation. In doing so, it offers lessons for policymakers in other countries. But beyond that, it is an exposition of the process of policymaking more generally in the 2020s, and offers a broader insight as to how outsiders can play a sensible role in other reform processes in developing and emerging countries.
Medieval Sacraments
Authors: Ross Shaun
Published: April 2023

This chapter examines the work of Chaucer and the Pearl-poet, demonstrating how, well before the supposedly proto-secular poetics of the seventeenth century, these two authors analogize their own poetic signification with the culturally central signification of the eucharist. Focussing on ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, ‘The Summoner’s Tale’, and Pearl in the context of the debate between nominalists and realists, this chapter argues that the playful and creative eucharistic poetics of these medieval authors belie a narrative that explains sacramentality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry as a substitution or consolation for an abandoned social ritual.
Friendship or Hatred? 1887–1891
Authors: Bew Paul
Published: April 2023

At first, all looked well when the Parnell Commission of inquiry ended as essentially a victory for Parnell. But then the conflict between Parnell and Dillon, not only over Parnell’s sexual morality but also his growing conservatism, finally exploded. Dillon continued to push his land agitation: Parnell refused to visit Ireland, probably depriving himself of likely allies when the divorce crisis erupted. The Parnell Commission’s final conclusions gave Parnell an apparently impregnable strength. He was doted on by both British Liberalism and Irish nationalism. Yet, beneath the surface, John Dillon and other key leaders were disappointed by Parnell’s lack of leadership in the land war. When the revelations concerning Parnell’s private life broke, he was no longer able to crush his internal opposition.
Dillon’s World 1891–1918
Authors: Bew Paul
Published: April 2023

Dillon’s late career was to be defined by his conflict with those who were attempting to build, as they saw it, ‘Parnellism without Parnell’. He was increasingly locked into the world of Gladstonian Liberalism and this intensified after 1909 when he finally—later than many of his colleagues—accepted that the land issue was fading in importance. He was also an ardent supporter of the Irish language but resolutely refused all attempts to use it as a weapon against Protestants. Dillon also accepted what is known today as the ‘principle of consent’ in Ulster politics. The First World War destroyed Dillon’s career—he believed it was right to support Liberal England. But many in Ireland did not admire Liberal England and switched their support to Sinn Fein, thus ending Dillon’s career in high-level politics.
Bearing Burdens and the Character of Yahweh
Authors: Mihut Cristian F.
Published: April 2023

Chapter 2 argues that the Hebrew Bible sees God fundamentally as a gracious, healing forgiver. Curative forgivingness—the settled disposition to aim at healing offenders through gracious gestures—is center stage in understanding and explaining God’s character. Starting from the dominant image of God bearing Israel’s burdens, it shows that due to its idiomatic frequency, theological significance, liturgical and ritualistic depth, and literary resonances, we can retrieve a two-pronged theological refrain: sin is an infectious disease that weighs down wrongdoers and their communities; God’s reliable response to burdened humans is grace and a readiness to carry their loads. It articulates this gracious divine readiness as the interweaving of two divine commitments: the commitment to separate the offender from the offense, and the commitment to absorb into God’s own being the consequences of the offense. It shows how the story of Jonah not only subverts retributive justice, but also affirms the centrality of a gracious, preemptive, and continuous divine disposition to absorb and neutralize iniquity. Since the account implies that God expresses forgiveness through image and ritual, it sketches an answer that relies on a joint, double-agency account of human-divine action. This idea is further developed in Chapters 3 and 5.
Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth-Century England
Authors: Little Katherine C.
Published: April 2023

This book explores sixteenth-century humanism as an origin for the idea of literature as good, even great, books. It argues that humanists located the value of books not only in the goodness of their writing—their eloquence—but also in their capacity to shape readers in good and bad behavior, thoughts, and feelings, in other words, in their morality. To approach humanism in this way, by attending to its moral interests, is to provide a new perspective on periodization, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance / early modern. That is, humanists did not so much break with medieval ideas about literature or with medieval models as they adapted and altered them, offering a new confidence about an old idea: the moral instructiveness of pagan, classical texts for Christian readers. This revaluation of literature was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, humanist confidence inspired authors to invent their own good books—good in style and morals—in morality plays such as Everyman and the Christian Terence tradition and in educational treatises such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s Boke of the Governour. On the other hand, humanism placed a new burden on authors, requiring their work to teach as well as delight. In the wake of humanism, authors struggled to articulate the value of their work for readers, returning to a pre-humanist path that they associated with Geoffrey Chaucer. This medieval-inflected doubt pervades the late sixteenth-century writings of the most prolific and influential Elizabethans—Robert Greene, George Gascoigne, and Edmund Spenser.
Stair’s ‘Plain Method’ and Structure
Authors: Bogle Stephen
Published: April 2023

Structure, taxonomy, and categorization are central to the juristic science. It not only affects the ease by which relevant rules of law can be found, but can intimate to the reader priorities and irrelevancies. This chapter examines Stair’s taxonomy. Yet it departs from existing literature by investigating in detail the philosophical and theological inspiration for Stair’s arrangement of the Institutions of the Law of Scotland (Institutions). It explains why Stair was impressed by Grotius’s demonstration of a universal and methodical approach in The Preliminary Discourse of The Rights of War and Peace and will show why Stair was receptive to François Douaren’s criticism of traditional methods otherwise used to arrange Roman law. These authors emboldened Stair to leave behind the known way of Roman law and to innovate. However, they did give him a structure or an arrangement. Rather as this chapter explores, Stair most likely drew upon a loose application of Aristotle’s physics and logic and Calvin’s structuring of the Moral Law. That is, it argues that the structure of the Institutions and his arrangement of his title on the law of contract is informed by a Calvinist epistemology of morality.
Freedom to Contract in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Bogle Stephen
Published: April 2023

Grotius’ concept of freedom to contract provides a crucial point of comparison to Stair’s theory. Stair can be seen as providing a Calvinist reworking of Grotius’s account of contracting. Stair ultimately understood liberty or freedom as how man brought glory to God. Importantly, for Stair this did not translate into a civil power of the church or ecclesiastical authority to monitor or regulate individual contracts, because that would be harmful and unnecessary. Stair saw man’s liberty to contract as coexisting with Calvinist social organization; individual liberty at the contracting level did not challenge the need for overall social and religious discipline at the collective level. Stair shares Grotius’ concern with the promotion of commerce and trade through free contract, but this is not the core of Stair’s theorizations. It is important to register how far Stair’s theologically based contractual ideas depart from Grotian natural law; and this takes on added significance as we trace the influence of Stair’s contract jurisprudence into the Enlightenment theories of commercial society in the eighteenth century.
Sanctuary
Authors: McGlynn Margaret
Published: April 2023

Using treatises, year books, and readings, Chapter 2 analyses the doctrinal development of sanctuary from 1215 to the late fifteenth century, as well as the development of abjuration as a core element of the working of sanctuary from the late twelfth century onwards. It argues that while the common lawyers accepted sanctuary as a legitimate right of the Church, they also conflated it with their understanding of franchisal and city jurisdictions, and in so doing constructed a peculiarly English version of sanctuary. This chapter distinguishes the fundamental sanctuary inherent in all churches and churchyards from the extended version of sanctuary granted by charter to favoured religious sites, usually abbeys.
Epilogue
Authors: McGlynn Margaret
Published: April 2023

This epilogue reviews the broad picture of the changes in benefit of clergy and sanctuary between 1490 and the 1550s and analyzes their consequences and implications. It also re-considers our understanding of changes in the criminal law in the later part of the sixteenth century in light of this new picture of the changes under the early Tudors. Though both Mary’s and Elizabeth’s parliaments made changes to benefit of clergy, sanctuary, and criminal process, those changes were the final stages in working out a functional system after the changes of the Reformation that made Henry VIII’s system unsustainable. They were important, but less revolutionary than they have seemed.
Economics of vaccine delivery
Authors: Pariyo George , Abiodun Onaopemipo
Published: April 2023

The efficiency of a vaccine delivery system can be measured as the cost per dose administered and can vary widely based on a country’s delivery system and local costs of labor, capital, and logistics. Because vulnerable populations can be more costly to reach, a sole focus on efficiency might have an unintended consequence of defeating a goal of equity and the reduction of vaccination coverage disparities. Mixed delivery systems for vaccines that involve both public and private vaccinators can sustain a wider variety of financial supports including private sector insurance premiums as well as tax-supported government health systems. Another possible downside of a sole focus on efficiency as cost per dose might be the sacrifice of the quality of operations in terms of safety, client centeredness, resilience, and adherence to the vaccine schedule.