bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Old to New Persian
Authors: Maggi Mauro , Orsatti Paola
Published: September 2018

This chapter looks at the evolution of Persian, the only language to be substantially documented in all three periods of Old, Middle, and New Iranian on account of its close association with political centres over the centuries: Old and Middle Persian with the Achaemenids and the Sasanians, New Persian with Islamic powers. The chapter includes two parts, preceded by a survey of research on the three stages of Persian. The first part presents the documentation of Old and Middle Persian, discusses the innovations of Old Persian, and considers the transition from Old to Middle Persian. The second part deals with the rise of New Persian by taking into account Early Judaeo-Persian, Persian in Syriac script, Manichaean New Persian, and the early texts in Arabic script. It then discusses the main changes of the language in its literary and non-literary varieties until Contemporary New Persian.
Generative Approaches to Syntax
Authors: Karimi Simin
Published: September 2018

This chapter offers an overview of some of the major syntactic and morphosyntactic properties of Persian. Of the topics introduced in this chapter, three have extensively been examined by various researchers over several decades: complex predicates, Ezafe constructions, and differential object marking. Issues related to scrambling, wh-constructions, and raising and control have also been discussed. Some of the issues introduced in this chapter have not been thoroughly examined in the literature. For example, problems related to complex DPs, specifically with respect to extraposition of the CP out of the complex DP, require close attention. Furthermore, the nature of resultative constructions, and whether Persian allows secondary predicate constructions need to be examined. Finally, this chapter touches on some topics that are under-studied: modality, negation, aspect, ellipsis, and sluicing. Due to the descriptive nature of this chapter, theoretical considerations are not thoroughly discussed, although briefly mentioned in some cases.
Specific Features of Persian Syntax
Authors: Samvelian Pollet
Published: September 2018

This chapter is devoted to three specific features of Persian syntax, namely, the Ezafe construction, differential object marking with the enclitic rā, and complex predicates, which have received a great deal of attention for more than thirty years. Each of these phenomena involves language-specific challenging facts which need to be accurately described and accounted for. At the same time, each constitutes a topic of cross-linguistic investigation for which the Persian data can be of crucial interest. The chapter is divided into three sections. Each section provides an overview of empirical facts and the way various theoretical studies have tried to account for them. While it was impossible to do justice to all influential studies because of the impressive amount of work on each topic, the article is nevertheless intended to be as exhaustive as possible and to maintain the balance between different theoretical approaches.
The Fourth Gospel as Narrative and Drama
Authors: Brant Jo-Ann A.
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines the development and trajectories of the study of the Gospel of John as a unified narrative, Johannine literary techniques, and how the experience of the reader becomes a significant focus of research. Besides looking at the role of recognition and reversals in the Gospel’s plot and the distinctive features of Johannine characterization, special attention is given to the use of techniques that give the Gospel a dramatic quality. These include such things as the use of direct speech to tell the story and to serve as the main action, Johannine construction of space and time to provide a sense of ‘lived experience’, and the role of irony and suspense as a means of engaging the reader.
Ideological Readings of the Fourth Gospel
Authors: Carter Warren
Published: September 2018

This article outlines a theoretical framework of ideological criticism and illustrates it with a number of recent discussions of John’s Gospel that utilize ideological and postcolonial approaches, often from specific personal, political, and social ‘locations’ of enquiry. It also examines analyses of John’s engagement with the personnel and structures of power of the imperializing-colonizing Roman empire. By identifying a significant body of current scholarship that employs these approaches the article demonstrates the vitality of questions asked and insights gained; arguing that the political contexts and implications both of the Gospel and of any reading are unavoidable, it invites mainstream Johannine studies to examine its own, often unspecified, ideological commitments.
The Purpose of the Ministry and Death of Jesus in the Gospel of John
Authors: Zumstein Jean
Published: September 2018

The paratext of the narrative, i.e. the Prologue (1:1–18) and the conclusion (20:30–31), specify the identity of the Johannine Jesus. The dominant perspective in John’s presentation of the person of Jesus is that of the envoy. This Christology of the envoy constitutes the hermeneutical matrix of the story. This enables a career of three phases for Jesus in John: The first focuses on his pre-existence and the incarnation. The second, which takes place in the fulfilment of his mission, is realized in the signs he performs and the words he speaks in both dialogues and discourses. The third and last phase is the return of Jesus to the Father through the cross. The interpretation of Jesus’ death occupies an important place in the Gospel from the beginning. The Christology of the envoy in three phases leads the reader to a new understanding of monotheism.
Johannine Commentaries in the Early Church
Authors: Lamb William
Published: September 2018

This chapter sets the making of commentaries on John’s Gospel, particularly within the Greek tradition, in the context of ancient Greek scholarship and the emergence of a scholastic tradition within the early Church. These commentaries drew on established philological conventions in order to clarify ambiguities and complexities within the text. At the same time, they served to amplify the meaning of the text in the face of new questions, controversies and preoccupations. Commentators used John’s Gospel ‘to think with’. With its allusive prose and symbolic discourse, the Fourth Gospel provoked commentators to respond to on-going doctrinal debate and to work out wider questions about Christian doctrine and identity.
John and other Gospels
Authors: Attridge Harold W.
Published: September 2018

Early Christians found many ways to proclaim their ‘good news’, prominently including the kind of popular biography represented by the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The relationship of the Fourth Gospel to those texts has long intrigued readers. The patristic claim that John supplemented the Synoptics gave way in the twentieth century to the opinion that John was independent. Opinion has recently shifted. While the compositional process complicates the picture, the Fourth Evangelist probably did draw on the Synoptics. He did so creatively, shaping his account to make distinctive theological and Christological points. He also drew from a broad tradition of Jesus’ teaching, evident in such texts as the Gospel of Thomas. Yet the Gospel also works creatively with elements of Synoptic teaching. The Fourth Gospel subsequently attained a wide acceptance and numerous echoes in the second century, including the unknown Gospel on Papyrus Egerton 2.
The Gospel of John and Archaeology
Authors: von Wahlde Urban C.
Published: September 2018

Archaeology has played a significant role in debates over how the narrative details and place names in the Gospel of John should be read. Whereas some scholars have claimed that many were fictitious and intended to be symbolic, others have demonstrated that the majority could be verified as historical by archaeology and by contemporary literature. In so far as archaeology has shown the Gospel includes information that is more specific and accurate than that given in the Synoptics, there has been a new appreciation of the extent to which material in the Gospel is historical. In turn this has implications for the larger study of the Gospel.
Segmentation of Speech
Authors: White Laurence
Published: September 2018

Spoken language is typically produced in a continuous stream, with the realization of phonemes influenced by adjacent sounds (coarticulation) and few silent boundaries between words. Despite these problems of variability and continuity, listeners generally perceive speech as a coherent sequence of discrete words. Understanding the segmentation process has entailed a search for fundamental units of speech perception, notably the syllable, and led to an understanding of the critical importance of word recognition, with segmentation often achieved implicitly when hearing our native languages in clear listening conditions. However, in first and second language acquisition, or when speech quality is compromised, a range of general and language-specific cues to the location of word boundaries are exploited by listeners, including intonation, timing, allophony, vowel harmony, lexical stress, and phonotactic regularities. Indeed, for infants learning their first languages, such cues may be hyperarticulated in adults’ infant-directed speech, thereby facilitating segmentation and hence vocabulary development.
Speech Production
Authors: Walker Grant , Hickok Gregory
Published: September 2018

The psycholinguistics of speech production has typically been studied separately from the motor control aspects. Psycholinguistic research in this area has largely focused on the construction of frames for combining and manipulating symbols at different levels of the linguistic hierarchy (phrases, words, phonemes, and so on), while motor control research has focused on the biological coordination of muscles for breathing, vocalizing, and articulating. Despite the apparent differences, there are some areas of overlap that offer promising avenues for a unified approach to the investigation of speech production. This chapter discusses recent attempts at synthesizing these viewpoints and presents an example of research conducted under this framework: the development of a computational model of the picture-naming process in individuals with stroke-induced language impairment.
Spoken Word Production
Authors: Wheeldon Linda R. , Konopka Agnieszka E.
Published: September 2018

This chapter examines two distinct stages of the production of spoken words: the retrieval of semantic and lexical representations, followed by morphological and phonological processing. In both cases, it summarizes models of lexical representation and lexical selection that have focused on the retrieval of single words. These models agree that different lexical information becomes available at different points in time, with access to semantic and syntactic information preceding access to information about lexical form. The structure of this review reflects this dichotomy. Comprehensive production models must also account for the sequencing and timing of lexical processing in multiword utterances and for the effects of utterance context on the planning of lexical forms; thus, this review also addresses the issue of lexical integration in longer utterances. Empirical evidence from a range of paradigms is reviewed, including single-object naming paradigms, interference paradigms, and paradigms eliciting full sentences.
Connectionist Principles in Theories of Speech Production
Authors: Brehm Laurel , Goldrick Matthew
Published: September 2018

This chapter focuses on connectionist modeling in language production, highlighting how core principles of connectionism provide coverage for empirical observations about representation and selection at the phonological, lexical, and sentence levels. The first section focuses on the connectionist principles of localist representations and spreading activation. It discusses how these two principles have motivated classic models of speech production and shows how they cover results of the picture-word interference paradigm, the mixed error effect, and aphasic naming errors. The second section focuses on how newer connectionist models incorporate the principles of learning and distributed representations through discussion of syntactic priming, cumulative semantic interference, sequencing errors, phonological blends, and code-switching.
From Thought to Action
Authors: Rapp Brenda , Damian Markus F.
Published: September 2018

Written language is unlike other language components, in that reading and spelling are evolutionarily recent skills (i.e. human inventions that entered our repertoire only a few thousand years ago and have become widespread in the global population only in the past 100 years). Whereas reading has received considerable interest in psycholinguistics, written language production has been the “neglected” language modality, even though in this age of written electronic communication via email, texting, messaging, and so on, increasing numbers of people are processing written language as much or more than spoken language. In this chapter, we review some of the central issues in the psycholinguistics of single word written language production with the goal of providing the reader with an understanding of the cognitive and neural bases of this vital component of our language expertise.
Attention and Structural Choice in Sentence Production
Authors: Myachykov Andriy , Pokhoday Mikhail , Tomlin Russell
Published: September 2018

This chapter offers a review of experimental evidence about the role of the speaker’s attention in the choice of syntactic structure and the corresponding word order during sentence production. Here, we describe how the speaker’s syntactic choices reflect the regular mapping mechanism that reflects the features of the described event in the produced sentence. One of the most important event parameters that the speaker considers is the changing salience status of the event’s referents. This chapter summarizes current theoretical debate about the interplay between attention and sentence production mechanisms. Finally, it reviews the corresponding experimental evidence from languages with both restricted and flexible word orders.
Perspective-Taking During Conversation
Authors: Brown-Schmidt Sarah , Heller Daphna
Published: September 2018

In conversation, each person has their own perspective which is shaped by their unique set of life experiences. Considering of how one’s own perspective is similar to, or different from, the perspective of their conversational partner is crucial in order to communicate effectively in conversation. Effects of perspective are found in both production and comprehension, from the message level, to sentence type and structure, to words and their sounds. This chapter provides a review of past and present literature on the representations of perspective and the underlying mechanisms that support use of perspective in conversation, outlining both the central empirical findings and the key theoretical positions. We also discuss future lines of inquiry that would be essential to maintaining progress in our understanding of this most basic phenomenon.
Experimental Pragmatics
Authors: Noveck Ira
Published: September 2018

Experimental pragmatics is an area of cognitive science that tests hypotheses from (semantics and) pragmatics while employing rigorous methodologies from experimental psychology. Inspired by Grice’s seminal proposal, this area typically aims to uncover how sentence meaning is integrated while the listener is determining the speaker’s intended meaning. This chapter summarizes the findings with respect to three prominent experimental pragmatic topics: scalar implicature (e.g. the way some can implicitly mean some but not all); reference (e.g. how a listener goes about establishing which object among several is being referred to); and irony (which involves defining it and determining the extent to which cognitive effort and mindreading is critical to processing it). The review of each topic highlights how extralinguistic activities, such as inference-making and intention-reading, are critical to language and communication.
Visual Word Recognition
Authors: Rastle Kathleen
Published: September 2018

Learning to read is arguably the most important aspect of a child’s schooling, and provides the key means to obtaining new knowledge into adulthood. Yet, unlike human capacity for spoken language, reading is not a universal part of human experience. Instead, reading is a relatively recent cultural invention, acquired only through years of instruction and practice. Understanding the functional mechanisms that underpin this astonishing form of expertise is a central aim of modern psycholinguistics, and has been a question of interest since the beginnings of psychology as a scientific discipline. This chapter considers how we identify a printed letter string as a unique word and compute its meaning, focusing in particular on evidence gathered from the analysis of behavior. It identifies the most important emerging questions and describes areas in which neuroscience methods may make a substantive contribution.
How well does Statistical Learning Address the Challenges of Real-World Language Learning?
Authors: Sweeney Lucia , Gómez Rebecca L.
Published: September 2018

How well does statistical learning address the challenges of real-world language learning? This chapter presents progress in the domain of statistical learning since Saffran et al. (1996) conducted their seminal work. It highlights the extension of statistical learning to acquisition of natural language, and reviews investigations of how infants and adults segment words from speech, acquire word forms, and form abstract grammatical categories through tracking of transitional probabilities and non-adjacent dependencies. It also focuses on research demonstrating the influence of individual differences on statistical learning ability along with neuroimaging studies that reveal cognitive processes supporting statistical learning. The chapter ends by suggesting avenues of research that would further extend the application of statistical learning to natural language acquisition.
The Genetics of Language
Authors: Devanna Paolo , Dediu Dan , Vernes Sonja C.
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses the genetic foundations of the human capacity for language. It reviews the molecular structure of the genome and the complex molecular mechanisms that allow genetic information to influence multiple levels of biology. It goes on to describe the active regulation of genes and their formation of complex genetic pathways that in turn control the cellular environment and function. At each of these levels, examples of genes and genetic variants that may influence the human capacity for language are given. Finally, it discusses the value of using animal models to understand the genetic underpinnings of speech and language. From this chapter will emerge the complexity of the genome in action and the multidisciplinary efforts that are currently made to bridge the gap between genetics and language.
Models of Language Evolution
Authors: O’Grady Cathleen , Smith Kenny
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides evidence for the role of cultural evolution in the emergence of linguistic structure. It reviews these models, and discusses why the emergence of structure in language is a central question for evolutionary linguistics. Computational and experimental models demonstrate that pressures operating during language learning and language use can give rise to the appearance of design in language, through the repeated cycles of learning and use that characterizes language transmission. Finally, this chapter discusses how learning biases at the individual level lead to the presence of typological universals: systematic patterns in how the world’s languages tend to be structured.
Cognitive Electrophysiology of Language
Authors: Urbach Thomas P. , Kutas Marta
Published: September 2018

This chapter introduces psycholinguists to how neurally generated electrical potentials recorded at the scalp—the human electroencephalogram or EEG—have been and may be used to investigate language in real-time. Event-related brain potential (ERP) language research is situated in the historical landscape of electroencephalography and the emergence of cognitive electrophysiology. There are many different brain potentials associated with covert processes from sensation to cognition to motor responses that inevitably co-occur with language processes of interest to the psycholinguist. A selective review of these describes some that are common in psycholinguistic research (N400, P600, and anterior negativities: LAN, eLAN, nRef) as well as others of importance (sensory evoked potentials; mismatch negativity, MMN; contingent negative variation, CNV; P300). This diversity of potentials can confound interpretation of ERP results if overlooked or, as illustrated by some vignettes, serve to answer clear questions about language acquisition, processing, learning, production, and loss.
Source Estimation, Connectivity, and Pattern Analysis of EEG/MEG Data in Psycholinguistics
Authors: Hauk Olaf
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides a primer on source estimation, connectivity, and multivariate pattern analysis for electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG and MEG) data. The excellent temporal resolution of EEG and MEG allows investigating brain responses in five dimensions (space, time, and frequency), which provides unique opportunities for connectivity and multivariate pattern analysis methods. However, the application of these methods leads to several methodological challenges. This chapter describes some of the opportunities and challenges for source estimation, connectivity, and multivariate pattern analysis of EEG/MEG data. It illustrates their usefulness to address important questions from the neuroscience of language on the basis of recent studies in two research areas: the role of phonology in visual word recognition, and the brain networks underlying semantic word processing. It also briefly describes some recent developments in EEG/MEG research on speech processing and in multimodal neuroimaging of language functions.
Lexical Ambiguity
Authors: Rodd Jennifer
Published: September 2018

This chapter on lexical ambiguity examines how words with multiple meanings are learned, stored, and processed. Lexical ambiguity is ubiquitous: over 80% of common English words have more than one dictionary entry, with some words having very many different definitions. Being able to learn and process ambiguous words is therefore critical for skilled language comprehension. This chapter reviews experiments that indicate that ambiguous words can be relatively challenging to learn, and that the competition between alternative word meanings can delay processing of these words relative to unambiguous words. However, when ambiguous words occur within sentences readers/listeners can rapidly use contextual cues to select the most likely meaning, and if necessary reinterpret the sentence in the light of subsequent information. The chapter also reviews evidence from brain imaging studies that reveals the network of temporal and frontal brain regions that are known to be important for representing and processing ambiguous words.
Text Comprehension
Authors: Ferstl Evelyn C.
Published: September 2018

Text comprehension research analyzes processes needed for integrating sentences or utterances into a coherent discourse representation. This chapter introduces the linguistic concepts cohesion, coherence, and situation model and summarizes cognitive theories of text comprehension. The second section provides a brief overview of the most lively current research domains, divided into three parts: (a) Cognitive studies target the relationship between memory and comprehension, the integration of information across multiple texts, and mind wandering during reading. (b) Educational applications include automated systems for the analysis of text features and structures, as well as the design and testing of interventions for improving comprehension skill in readers. (c) Neuroimaging studies show that the anterior temporal lobes, the fronto-medial cortex, and the posterior cingulate cortex are as crucial for the functional neuroanatomy of text comprehension. The chapter concludes with methodological advances that will influence text comprehension research and provides an outlook to future perspectives.
Legal History As Economic History
Authors: Fleming Anne
Published: September 2018

Over the past century, legal history and economic history developed as separate fields of scholarship. Their separation reflects an understanding of law and economy as distinct objects that may be pulled apart and each analysed apart from the other. Yet, even assuming that law and economy are separable, it is undeniable that they interact. This chapter first maps the state of the field over the past several decades, identifying two major questions that have guided much of the scholarship on the border between legal and economic history. It then describes two of the theoretical frameworks available to legal historians for conceptualizing the relationship between law and economy. Finally, it argues that future work on the history of political economy should put aside measuring the impact of law on economy (and vice versa) and instead explore how the boundary between law and economy has been constructed and maintained over time.
Legal History
Authors: Halliday Paul
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses the meaning of taking a long view of the law. Artists and writers in Jane Austen’s England thought a lot about perspective and the picturesque: about what it means to choose one position instead of another from which to observe landscapes or human relationships, and thus about what it means to frame and thereby take a view. In legal history, taking a long view shows us that forces that appear motionless were not and are not. By placing previously undetected or unconnected objects—events, texts—in long flows of time, we see when and how human choices redirected those flows. As we do, we appreciate how our law has been and remains a result of conscious efforts to articulate the good and to fashion practices for obtaining it.
Philosophical Analysis and Historical Inquiry
Authors: Del Mar Maksymilian
Published: September 2018

This chapter considers the relationship between philosophical analysis and historical inquiry, including the specific virtues that historical inquiry brings, what is lost when theorizing is restricted to philosophical analysis, and why this all matters for theorizing law and legal thought. In other words, the chapter attempts to articulate how historical inquiry is generative theoretically and how it can exist, as part of the broader activity of theorizing, in fruitful tension with philosophical analysis. The approach is based on a particular concept of historical inquiry and its resulting historical insights, which is presented in the first part of the chapter. The second part offers some illustrations of the value of historical inquiry for theorizing law and legal thought.
Sociological Jurisprudence and The Spirit of The Common Law
Authors: Morag-Levine Noga
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores the work and influence of Roscoe Pound who offered sociological jurisprudence in response to transatlantic-inspired threats to the future of the common law. At issue was the rise of social science as an alternative, civil-law-affiliated, administrative paradigm that simultaneously threatened the academic interests of the law schools, the professional concerns of the bar, and the core constitutional principles of judicial supremacy. Within this context, Pound selectively drew on European social legal theory with the goal of saving the common law from itself. The project consisted of two primary proposals for reform, one focused on the universities, the other on the courts. Through the injection of social-scientific content into legal pedagogy and research, sociological jurisprudence forged a socio-legal paradigm that together with lowering the barriers separating law from society also ensured that law would continue to exist as a distinct field of inquiry in the universities and beyond. Where the courts were concerned, sociological jurisprudence answered pressures for radical curtailment of judicial review with a narrow, formalist, construction of the deficiency at the core of the Lochner Court’s reasoning. It was a problem definition that successfully served to deflect direct attacks on judicial supremacy. Largely hidden going forward has been the extent to which the constitutional battle lines of the early twentieth century were drawn between rival, common law- and civil-law-based paradigms of administrative governance.
Law & Society in Historical Legal Research
Authors: Fisk Catherine L.
Published: September 2018

This chapter begins with a brief survey of different interdisciplinary approaches to the historical study of law. It then explores the growth of both halves of the law & society dyad. It explains how that growth put pressure on the conjunctive metaphor that has long been used to describe the relationship between law and that which stands outside law, whether it be society, economy, polity, or something else. It suggests that the nature of law & society approaches to history has a great deal to do with what practitioners of the historical study of law conceptualize as being required by the ampersand, or by whatever other metaphor one might put in its place.
Tracing Legal History In Continental Civil Law
Authors: Pihlajamäki Heikki
Published: September 2018

This chapter begins with a brief introductory note on the role of legal history in ancient Roman law, and the legal scholarship of medieval glossators and commentators. It then turns to the dominant schools of continental legal scholarship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ‘Neo-Bartolists’ and the usus modernus pandectarum. It considers the rise of the Historical School in Germany and the corresponding movements elsewhere in continental Europe. Methodologically, the representatives of the Historical School were the first professional legal historians in the modern sense of the term. Finally, the chapter retells the story of the rise of European legal history in the post-war period, and the recent trends towards a creation of global legal histories. It shows that legal history’s turns have in many ways followed from not only legal scholarship in general, but also from developments in historical science and global politics.
Historical Research On Islamic Law
Authors: Salaymeh Lena
Published: September 2018

This chapter provides a partial sketch of recent Islamic legal historiography in the West, with modest suggestions for future research. It suggests that historical research on Islamic law is a burgeoning field facing many of the political and normative challenges of scholarship in Islamic studies more generally. It would behove this field to confront these challenges more directly both by acknowledging them and by recognizing how they influence the contemporary writing of historiography. In turn, it is important to resist allowing contemporary politics to dictate the borders and content of historical research on Islamic law. With a wide array of sources and questions that have not yet been investigated thoroughly, historical research on Islamic law is a field that will continue to grow and to transform in unpredictable ways.
Imperial Law
Authors: Mchugh Paul G.
Published: September 2018

This chapter attempts to situate imperial law in terms of legal historical research today. It argues that the new-style imperial legal studies have shed the historiography of reception’s fixation upon imperial law as inherently imperative without discarding the interest in institutional culture and its generation of legal meaning. Today’s historian of imperial law will encounter terms such as ‘governmentality’, ‘police’, and ‘subaltern’. They will be seeing law as process and imbricated with other socially constructed activity rather than as fixed and closed. They will be finding a travelling imperium, an ocean-going legalism with nodes and networks rather than one set sedentarily inside a series of fragmenting and territorialized proto-nationial peripheries.
The Transformation of The Common Law
Authors: Parker Kunal M.
Published: September 2018

This chapter traces the transformation of American common law thinking between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the early twentieth century, many viewed the common law as a kind of ‘unconscious’ lawmaking that had to be repudiated in favour of legislative and administrative ‘conscious’ lawmaking. This pointed to a massive change in the ways in which American legal thinkers would conceive of the place of the common law (indeed, law itself) in the American polity. But even after the common law underwent this change, it is by no means clear that lawmaking would become entirely ‘conscious’ or, in other words, that all elements of ‘unconsciousness’ in lawmaking would be eradicated.
What Do Contracts Histories Tell Us About Capitalism?
Authors: Rosenberg Anat
Published: September 2018

This chapter reads contracts histories as discussions about capitalism. What do histories tell us about capitalism? What kind of concerns do they betray about it? It presents a case study of Britain, the first capitalist nation, in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It argues that histories of contracts of this era, viewed as a whole, address capitalism within the established modes of political-economic debate: origins—when it emerged, a question intertwined with determining what elements were fundamental to capitalism; and distribution—questions of economic, social, and cultural equality in capitalism. The chapter separates and simplifies these themes to introduce existing work and highlight thick points of controversy and research. The second part moves beyond these concerns, and offers two other perspectives on contracts and capitalism: embodiment and nationalism.
Historical Analysis in Criminal Law
Authors: Loughnan Arlie
Published: September 2018

This chapter offers a counter-history of criminal trial verdicts, restoring special verdicts to the story typically told about trial verdicts. According to this typical story, the dominance of the general verdict (‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’, a determination of both the factual and legal issues at trial) is thought to be both inevitable and right. While special verdicts are now virtually unknown in the English trial process, during the period of the development of the modern criminal trial, they played a greater role in criminal process, functioning as a means by which the seismic changes associated with the appearance of the modern criminal trial were negotiated in the courtroom. Bringing to light the all-but-forgotten past of trial verdicts opens the way to think again about verdicts in the current era, considering the possibilities for the restoration of a meaningful role for special verdicts.
Redeeming the American Founding?
Authors: Spaulding Norman W.
Published: September 2018

Every revolutionary liberal democratic founding has its secret drawers where one can find the illiberal ideas and mnemonic traces of illiberal acts in and through which the state came into being and sustains itself. With regard to the American founding, conventional approaches either ignore the American Civil War altogether, or attempt to render it continuous with the constitution of 1789 by arguing that, apart from the abolition of slavery, the Union survived the war intact. Illiberal aspects of the revolution itself are also ignored. For many Americans, it would seem, it is better to keep the drawer closed. This chapter considers whether it is possible to develop an account of the founding in which the drawer is left open. Although the chapter concentrates on the American founding, parallel interpretive challenges attending the English and French revolutions are explored.
Rhetoric and The Possibilities of Legal History
Authors: Constable Marianne , Esmeir Samera
Published: September 2018

This chapter shows how rhetorically inflected legal histories may integrate questions about sources and archives, destruction and silences, and the many temporalities of law. It argues that rhetorically oriented legal histories foreground issues that today’s legal histories sometimes forego. Rhetorically inflected legal histories make explicit and render problematic the ways in which law is an object of study for the scholar of history—a subject who draws on and interprets legal records to recount how law has changed over time. Rather than aiming to reverse this subject-object relation and to make history the object of law, rhetoric dwells on the ways in which legal historians’ assumptions as to the sources, silences, and temporalities of legal history correspond to knowledge of the positivist law of the modern state.
Historians’ Amicus Briefs
Authors: Erman Sam , Perl-Rosenthal Nathan
Published: September 2018

This chapter seeks to understand why historians often find amicus brief writing so vexed and how they have navigated the challenges it poses. It starts with a conceptual analysis of the historians’ amicus brief, in two parts, focused on the problem of expertise. Courts permit historians to participate as friends of the court because they believe that scholars’ knowledge of the past and its relationship to the present are valuable to their juridical work. Yet there are two troublesome questions about expertise that threaten this cross-disciplinary collaboration. One is the nature of historians’ expertise. The second is that the courts’ expertise also concern relating the past to the present, especially where precedent is concerned. The chapter then explores high-profile amicus briefs by historians since the Second World War and considers what these analyses tell us about the prospects for future amicus briefs.
Historical Analysis in Environmental Law
Authors: Schorr David B.
Published: September 2018

The general view of environmental law’s history is that prior to explosion of environmental legislation in the 1970s, environmental regulation as we think of it today—a branch of public law in which the regulator sets standards for activities with environmental impacts—was insignificant. Environmental law lacks a historical anchor, a back story, which is unfortunate for the historical ignorance it perpetuates. Environmental law also lacks history as a mode of argument or analysis. For these reasons, environmental law needs both heightened historical analysis and a sense of its own historical roots. This chapter sketches current, possible, and desirable directions for future research into the history of environmental law. It also offers some thoughts on why the exploration of environmental law matters.
Law as Social History
Authors: Edwards Laura F.
Published: September 2018

This chapter explores two related themes embedded within the relationship between legal history and social history, focusing on the nineteenth century to highlight conceptual points that also apply more generally to other periods. First, it argues the field of legal history takes a broader understanding of the law than other historical fields. Moving beyond the written records, legal officials, and designated institutions usually associated with the law’s presence and influence, legal historians extend law into the realm of social history. As that scholarship shows, law flourished in many institutional contexts and even in rural byways and city streets, where it structured broad-reaching economic and cultural dynamics as well as the ordinary relationships of daily life. Second, the chapter argues that legal history changes our view of social history by exposing the law’s presence in places and relationships that most historians imagine to be far from remotely legal.
Online Support Communities
Authors: Coulson Neil S.
Published: September 2018

In recent years online support communities have increased in popularity and, for those digitally connected, provide a convenient and accessible means of reaching out to others facing similar health-related challenges. This chapter considers online support communities in terms of their popularity and the unique characteristics arising from the computer-mediated nature of the communication platform. It discusses both the range of possible benefits and problems to members. It presents a summary of evidence describing who engages with online support communities and why. It pays particular attention to describing what community members talk about online as well as patterns of communication in terms of therapeutic processes. Since the study of online support communities spans several disciplinary fields, the chapter also presents a selection of popular theoretical frameworks used by researchers. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the outcomes arising from engagement with online support.
Positive Aspects of Social Media
Authors: Quinn Sally
Published: September 2018

Despite the negative press social media platforms like Facebook receive in mainstream media, there is a large amount of research showing positive associations with their use. Although it is accepted that there are potential negative effects associated with using these platforms, this chapter focuses on the positive aspects and discusses the evidence, showing that the use of social media platforms can be positively associated with feelings of connectedness with others, to providing and receiving social support from others (e.g., social capital), and to psychological well-being. The chapter also examines the evidence suggesting that certain groups of people (e.g., socially anxious) may be more likely to reap these benefits. Finally, the chapter examines the evidence showing how the use of social media by young people specifically has been seen to have some relationship with positive outcomes.
The Identity Theory of Truth
Authors: Candlish Stewart , Damnjanovic Nic
Published: September 2018

When one thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case. In this truistic but influential thought lies the germ of the identity theory of truth. For, in the broadest terms, the identity theory holds that truth is a matter of identity between how things are and how one takes them to be. Giving such a theory substantive content, however, requires the specification of a pair of candidate entities for identification. The early sections of this chapter consider identity theories based on the most frequently proposed pair of entities, namely facts and propositions, focusing in particular on whether such theories can steer between the Scylla of mere truism and the Charybdis of absurdity (such as making falsehood impossible). The final sections briefly examine the connections between the identity theory of truth and quietism, on the one hand, and monistic idealism on the other.
Truthmakers
Authors: Cameron Ross P.
Published: September 2018

Truthmaker theory says that what is true depends on what exists. This chapter spells out this thesis, its implications, and why we should believe it. It looks at the connection between truth-making and the in virtue of relation. It looks at reasons to accept or reject truthmaker maximalism—the claim that absolutely every truth has a truthmaker—and truthmaker necessitarianism—the claim that if A makes p true then it is impossible for A to exist without p being true. It asks what views on essentialism are compatible with truthmaker theory. Three reasons for accepting the view are discussed. The views that truthmaker theory is required by the correct theory of truth, and that it is a commitment of realism, is rejected. It is argued that the best reason to accept truthmaker theory is that it yields a parsimonious account of what truths are brute.
Truth, Objectivity, and Realism
Authors: Shieh Sanford
Published: September 2018

This chapter is concerned with a semantic (as opposed to ontological) approach to metaphysics, developed by Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright, that takes truth as fundamental, and explicates debates about realisms in terms of truth. On this approach realism is fundamentally concerned with the objectivity of truth, where objectivity does not consist in the existence of entities. The chapter shows that Dummett worked with three separable criteria for the objectivity of truth, which support a subtle and flexible framework for characterizing various degrees of realism. It argues that Dummett’s so-called “manifestation” arguments against semantic realism can handle many objections that have been brought against them. It discusses Wright’s minimalism about truth, his four semantic criteria of realism, their inter-relations, and their connections to Dummett’s criteria. It concludes with reflections on the meta-philosophical status of the semantic approach: the reasons in favor of pursuing it and its adequacy to metaphysical reflection.
Bivalence and Determinacy
Authors: Rumfitt Ian
Published: September 2018

The principle that every statement is bivalent (i.e. either true or false) has been a bone of philosophical contention for centuries, for an apparently powerful argument for it (due to Aristotle) sits alongside apparently convincing counterexamples to it. This chapter analyzes Aristotle’s argument, then, in the light of this analysis, examines three sorts of problem case for bivalence. Future contingents, it is contended, are bivalent. Certain statements of higher set theory, by contrast, are not. Pace the intuitionists, though, this is not because excluded middle does not apply to such statements, but because they are not determinate. Vague statements too are not bivalent, in this case because the law of proof by cases does not apply. The chapter goes on to show how this opens the way to a solution to the ancient paradox of the heap (or Sorites) that draws on quantum logic.
Relative Truth
Authors: Cappelen Herman , Huvenes Torfinn Thomesen
Published: September 2018

The word “relativism” has been applied to many different positions in philosophy. This chapter focuses on a contemporary version of relativism. According to this version of relativism, truth is relative, and not just in the familiar sense that sentences that contain indexicals can have different truth-values relative to different contexts. The chapter describes some ways in which this idea has been developed. For instance, it matters what the relevant bearers of truth are and what truth is taken to be relative to. It also compares this version of relativism with other views that have been labeled “relativist.” Contemporary relativism has generally been developed in order to make sense of particular areas of discourse, such as discourse about matters of taste. In addition to describing some of the proposed applications, the chapter describes some of the motivations and problems for the view. Considerations involving disagreement play an important role here.
Truth in Mathematics
Authors: Linnebo Øystein
Published: September 2018

This chapter discusses four questions concerning the nature and role of the concept of truth in mathematics. First, the question as to whether the concept of truth is needed in a philosophical account of mathematics is answered affirmatively: a formalist approach to the language of mathematics is inadequate. Next, following Frege, a classical conception of mathematical truth is defended, involving the existence of mathematical objects. The third question concerns the relation between the existence of mathematical objects and the objectivity of mathematical truth. A traditional platonist seeks to explain the latter in terms of the former, while Frege reverses this order of explanation. Finally, the question regarding the extent to which mathematical statements have objective truth-values is discussed.