bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Toleration
Authors: Horton John
Published: September 2018

Toleration emerged as an important idea in the seventeenth century, receiving its fullest defence in John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Initially developed in the context of attempts to restore peace in a Europe convulsed by religious conflicts, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it came to be extended to the accommodation of disputes about racial, sexual and social differences. Toleration is widely thought to be an essential element of a free society, especially one marked by moral and cultural pluralism, and it figures particularly prominently in the political theory of liberalism.

The paradigm example of toleration is the deliberate decision to refrain from prohibiting, hindering or otherwise coercively interfering with conduct of which one disapproves, although one has the power to do so. The principal components of the concept of toleration are: a tolerating subject and a tolerated subject (either may be an individual, group, organization or institution); an action, belief or practice which is the object of toleration; a negative attitude (dislike or moral disapproval) on the part of tolerator toward the object of toleration; and a significant degree of restraint in acting against it.

Philosophical arguments have mostly concerned: the range of toleration (what things should or should not be tolerated?); the degree of restraint required by toleration (what forms of opposition are consistent with toleration?); and, most importantly, the justification of toleration (why should some things be tolerated?).
Welfare
Authors: Weale Albert
Published: September 2018

Notions of welfare occur widely in political philosophy and political argument. For example, utilitarianism is a social ethic that may be interpreted as giving a pre-eminent place to the idea that the welfare of society should be the overriding goal of public policy. Discussion of the ethics of redistribution focuses upon the institutions and practices of the so-called welfare state. Even those not convinced that we can validly speak of animal rights will often accept that considerations of animal welfare should play a part in legislation and morals. Moreover, the concept of welfare is clearly related to, and indeed overlaps with, concepts like ‘needs’ or ‘interests’, which are also central to public decision making and action.

Welfare can be thought of in three ways. Firstly, there is a subjective sense, in which to say that something contributes to a person’s welfare is to say that it makes for the satisfaction of a preference. However, people can adapt their preferences to their circumstances, and happy slaves might be better off changing their preferences than having them satisfied. This thought leads on to the second sense of welfare as doing well according to some objective measure, like the possession of property. However, this conception can ignore subjective differences between people and fail to account for their capacity to take advantage of their objective circumstances. Hence, a third conception of welfare would make the capacity to take advantage of one’s possessions an essential element of welfare. A satisfactory overall conception will have to bring these ideas together.
Bloch, Ernst Simon (1885–1977)
Authors: Geoghegan Vincent
Published: September 2018

Bloch was one of the most innovative Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. His metaphysical and ontological concerns, combined with a self-conscious utopianism, distanced him from much mainstream Marxist thought. He was sympathetic to the classical philosophical search for fundamental categories, but distinguished earlier static, fixed and closed systems from his own open system, in which he characterized the universe as a changing and unfinished process. Furthermore, his distinctive materialism entailed the rejection of a radical separation of the human and the natural, unlike much twentieth-century Western Marxism. His validation of utopianism was grounded in a distinctive epistemology centred on the processes whereby ‘new’ material emerges in consciousness. The resulting social theory was sensitive to the many and varied ways in which the utopian impulse emerges, as, for example, in its analysis of the utopian dimension in religion.
Mandeville, Bernard (1670–1733)
Authors: Goldsmith M.M.
Published: September 2018

Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714) scandalized contemporaries by arguing that the flourishing commercial society they valued depended on vices they denounced. It resulted not only from the complementary satisfaction of appetites but was also based upon pride, envy and shame, which Mandeville traced to ‘self-liking’. Numerous individuals, driven by their own desires, acted independently to produce goods which required extensive, cooperative operations – an idea central to the economic concept of a market.

Mandeville initially appeared to credit ‘skilful politicians’ with originating morality and society. However, in defending and expounding his views, he set out ‘conjectural histories’ of the gradual development of many complex social activities and institutions, including language and society itself, thereby denying that they had been invented by public spirited heroes. Throughout his works, Mandeville adopted a strict criterion of virtue, repeatedly denying that he was advocating, rather than exposing, the vices he identified as inherent in human society.
Voegelin, Eric (1901–85)
Authors: Hopfl H.M.
Published: September 2018

Throughout his career, Voegelin was concerned with modernity; unlike his contemporaries he sought the explanation of its character and deformities (especially totalitarianism) in the restoration of ‘political science’ as Plato and Aristotle understood it. He therefore explored order in the individual’s soul, political society, history and the universe, and its source in God. He did so by studying the representation of order in philosophy (Eastern as well as Western) and in revelation and myth. Voegelin concluded that ‘gnosticism’, the misinterpretation of the insights of myth, philosophy and revelation as descriptions of some future perfected society, and the wilful denial of transcendence and human limitation, represented the essence of modernity.
Affirmative action
Authors: Boxill Bernard
Published: September 2018

The term ‘affirmative action’ originated in the USA under President Kennedy. Originally it was designed to ensure that employees and applicants for jobs with government contractors did not suffer discrimination. Within a year, however, ‘affirmative action’ was used to refer to policies aimed at compensating African-Americans for unjust racial discrimination, and at improving their opportunities to gain employment. An important implication of this shift was that affirmative action came to mean preferential treatment.

Preferential treatment was later extended to include women as well as other disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups. The arguments in favour of preferential treatment can be usefully classified as backward-looking and forward-looking. Backward-looking arguments rely on the claim that preferential treatment of women and disadvantaged racial minorities compensates these groups or the members for the discrimination and injustices they have suffered. Forward-looking arguments rely on their claim that preferential treatment of women and disadvantaged racial minorities will help to bring about a better society.

There has been much criticism of both types of argument. The most common accusation is that preferential treatment is reverse discrimination. Other criticisms are based around who exactly should be compensated, by what means and to what extent, and at whose cost. Finally, there is the fear of the unknown consequences of such action. Arguments have been forwarded to try and solve such difficulties, but the future of preferential treatment seems to lie in a combination of the two arguments.
Rand, Ayn (1905–82)
Authors: Kukathas Chandran
Published: September 2018

Ayn Rand was a Russian-born US novelist and philosopher who exerted considerable influence in the conservative and libertarian intellectual movements in the post-war USA. Rand’s ideas were expressed mainly through her novels; she set forth a view of morality as based in rational self-interest and in political philosophy defended an unrestrained form of capitalism.
Nozick, Robert (1938–2002)
Authors: Wolff Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Although Robert Nozick published on an enormous range of topics, he is best known as a political philosopher, and especially for his powerful and entertaining statement of libertarianism. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Nozick presents an image of a fully voluntary society, in which people cooperate only on terms which violate no one’s rights.

Nozick’s other major contributions to philosophy include an analysis of knowledge, and an accompanying response to scepticism, an account of personal identity and contributions to decision theory and the theory of rationality.
Strauss, Leo (1899–1973)
Authors: Drury Shadia B.
Published: September 2018

Leo Strauss was a German-Jewish émigré political philosopher and historian of political thought, who wrote some fifteen books and eighty articles on the history of political thought from Socrates to Nietzsche. Strauss was no ordinary historian of ideas; he used the history of thought as a vehicle for expressing his own ideas. In his writings, he contrasted the wisdom of ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle with the foolhardiness of modern philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke. He thought that the loss of ancient wisdom was the reason for the ‘crisis of the West’ – an expression that was in part a reference to the barbarities of the Holocaust. He therefore sought to recover the lost wisdom. He studied the classics and was a great devotee of Plato and Aristotle. However, he developed unusual interpretations of classical texts.
Bernstein, Eduard (1850–1932)
Authors: Tudor H.
Published: September 2018

Eduard Bernstein, an eminent German social democrat, is now noted as ‘the father of revisionism’. He made a reputation as the radical editor of the German Social Democratic Party organ, Der Sozialdemokrat, and became a close associate of Friedrich Engels. However, after the death of Engels he abandoned revolutionary Marxism and argued that socialism could be achieved by legal means and piecemeal reform. In doing this, he raised fundamental questions concerning the validity of Marxism and the direction of socialist political strategy, thus provoking what is now known as the ‘revisionist debate’.
Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–59)
Authors: Siedentop L.A.
Published: September 2018

Tocqueville once observed that his temperament was the ‘least philosophical’ imaginable. He meant that his mind was governed by passionate commitment, a determination to defend civil and political liberty against threats resulting from social levelling and the growth of state power. Thus, Tocqueville’s most famous work, De la démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America) (1835, 1840), did not spring from detached curiosity about US institutions. It was rather an attempt to draw lessons from US society and government which could be used to reform French institutions. His belief in local autonomy – he called the New England township a ‘school for citizens’ – led him to develop a distinctive conception of liberty that combined elements of ancient citizenship and modern autonomy. That conception also shaped his own political career and later writings. In L’Ancien régime et la révolution (The Old Regime and the French Revolution) (1856) Tocqueville traced bitter class conflicts in France to the destruction of local autonomy long before 1789.
Multiculturalism
Authors: Ripstein Arthur
Published: September 2018

Multicultural political philosophy explores ways of accommodating cultural diversity fairly. Public policies often have different consequences for members of different cultural groups. For example, given the importance of language to culture, and the role of the modern state in so many aspects of life, the choice of official languages will affect different people very differently. Similar issues arise concerning the cultural content of education and the criminal law, and the choice of public holidays. To avoid policies that create unfair burdens, multicultural theory turns to abstract inquiries about such things as the relation between culture and individual wellbeing, or the relation between a person’s culture and the appropriate standards for judging them. Multiculturalism raises related questions for democratic theory also. Culture may be important to deciding on appropriate units of democratic rule and to the design of special mechanisms for representing minorities within such units. Each of these questions is made more difficult in the context of cultures that reject the demands of liberty or equality. The challenge for philosophers is to develop a principled way of thinking about these issues.
Immigration and refugees
Authors: Gibney Matthew J.
Published: September 2018

Immigration has emerged as one of the most controversial issues for liberal states in the current era of economic globalization. Debates over the entrance of non-citizens are contentious partly because they are often driven by feelings widely seen as morally illegitimate, such as racism. But controversy also emerges because border controls raise complex ethical issues about the constitution of political communities and boundaries of justice. Contemporary debates over admissions evince a profound conflict between the claims of immigrants, who, in a world of great inequality, may have powerful reasons for seeking a new state, and host societies, whose members see controlling entrance as necessary to preserve their way of life. Despite the centrality of this clash to modern politics, many of the ethical issues raised by immigration have only recently begun to command the attention of philosophers.

Control over immigration is usually seen as a constitutive feature of modern statehood. Yet the early theorists of the emerging European state and international order, such as Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, paid very little attention to questions of immigration. Eighteenth-century theorists of international society, including Kant and Vattel, touched briefly on questions of entrance, articulating accounts of responsibilities to individuals seeking asylum. A century later, Henry Sidgwick discussed immigration more systematically, contrasting nationalist and cosmopolitan perspectives on the topic, before affirming the prerogative of the state to decide admissions. In the last two decades, philosophers and political theorists, influenced by growing migration pressures and the expanding post-1945 rights culture in the West, have subjected the view that states have a moral prerogative to admit and reject whom they choose to increasing scrutiny. A number of scholars have even advocated the abolition of all migration controls.
Sufficientarianism
Authors: Gosseries Axel
Published: September 2018

Sufficientarianism is a theory of distributive justice. Rather than being concerned with inequalities as such or with making the situation of the least well off as good as possible, sufficientarian justice aims at making sure that each of us has enough.

Understanding sufficientarianism requires us properly to grasp the notion of a sufficiency threshold. We also need to see why sufficientarians find it more compelling than other doctrines, whether and how they combine it with these other views, and what the main criticisms of it actually consist in.
Legal positivism
Authors: Jori Mario
Published: September 2018

Legal positivism is the approach in the philosophy of law which treats ‘positive law’ – law laid down in human societies through human decisions – as a distinct phenomenon, susceptible of analysis and description independently of morality, divine law or mere natural reality. It shares with philosophical positivism the aim of dealing in facts, but these are facts about legality and legal systems. Insistence on the distinctness of positive law has been integral to the ‘rule of law ideal’ because of the aim of clear law applied by neutral legal officials. However, debates about positivism have been marred by a degree of conceptual confusion: positivism often appears to mean something different to its supporters and to its enemies, and many attacks are launched against straw men. Consequently, much depends on the definition of legal positivism that is used.

Attempts have been made to put some order into the discussion. Consider, for instance, H.L.A. Hart’s list of meanings of legal positivism (which cumulatively count as features of positivism): (1) law as human commands; (2) absence of any necessary connection between law and morals; (3) the study of law as meaning, as distinct from sociology, history and evaluation; (4) the contention that a legal system is a closed system, sufficient in itself to justify legal decisions; (5) non-cognitivism in ethics (Hart 1958). Norberto Bobbio’s list is shorter and more orderly, but at first sight not too different (Bobbio 1960): legal positivism has been conceived as: (1) a neutral, scientific approach to law; (2) a set of theories depicting the law as the product of the modern state, claiming that the law is a set of positive rules of human origin, and ultimately amounting to a set of statutes, collected in legal systems or orders; (3) an ideology of law that gives a value to positive law as such, implying that it should always be obeyed. However, in this list, unlike Hart’s, the ‘meanings’ cannot be added together, the first and last being incompatible. The connection between the three points is as follows: for positivists the theories of Bobbio’s second point (law is made up of rules produced by the state) yield a scientific and value-free approach to law; for the adversaries of legal positivism they yield only ideology, that is hidden value judgments in favour of the power of the State.

The shortest way to understand what is at issue in these abstract discussions is to proceed by contrasting legal positivism with its main critics’ approach to law. It is noteworthy that on this point legal realists and natural law theorists, although starting from different and even opposite points of view, agree in concluding that legal positivism is an ideological, covertly evaluative, thesis.
Legal reasoning and interpretation
Authors: MacCormick Neil
Published: September 2018

Legal reasoning is the process of devising, reflecting on, or giving reasons for legal acts and decisions or justifications for speculative opinions about the meaning of law and its relevance to action. Many contemporary writers, such as Aulis Aarnio (1987), Robert Alexy (1988), Manuel Atienza (1991) and Aleksander Peczenik (1989), propound the view that legal reasoning is a particular instance of general practical reasoning. They suppose, that is to say, that reasoning can link up with action, guiding one what to do, or showing whether or not there are good reasons for a proposed course of action or for something already done. They suppose also that in law reason links up to legal decisions in this way. Both suppositions are well founded. Law regulates what to do and how to respond to what has been done, doing so within an institutional framework of legislatures, lawcourts, enforcement agencies and the like. It is a feature of legal institutions that they are expected to have, and usually do give, good reasons for what they do, and to do this in public. Legal reasoning is therefore not only a special case of practical reasoning, but a specially public one.

Rationality in action has at least two requirements: first, attention to facts, to the true state of affairs in relation to which one acts; second, attention to reasons for action relevant to the facts ascertained. The former aspect concerns reasoning about evidence; the latter, reasoning about rules or norms as reasons for action. In law, such rules and other norms have an institutional character. But how are these applied – by some kind of deductive reasoning, or nondeductively? Behind the rules of the law, there presumably lie other reasons, reasons for having these rules. What kind of reasons are these, developed through what modes of discourse? A discourse of principles, perhaps – but then how do reasons of principle themselves differ from rules? Reasoning from either rules or principles must always involve some process of interpretation, so how does interpretive reasoning enter into the practical reason of law? Answering such questions is the business of a theory of legal reasoning. Legal reasoning is to be understood as a form of practical reasoning concerning these very issues.
Common law
Authors: Krygier Martin
Published: September 2018

Common law and custom are features of most enduring legal orders. In English law the concepts have taken on special and interrelated significance, since English law is said to be grounded in common law and that in turn is said to derive from custom. According to classical common law theory, which crystallized in the seventeenth century, common law grew from the customs of the English people. It was not made by legal officials, as statutes are. Change was accommodated in this theory, on the basis not of identity of elements of law over time but of continuity, a continuity of authority and reception of legal customs, and of the traditional legal order which declared them to be law. The role of legal officials – particularly judges – was to interpret and declare legal custom; their judgments provided evidence of it. They did not make it or invent it. This mode of development through continual interpretation and reinterpretation of the significance and bearing of the legal inheritance was, according to common lawyers, better adapted to social complexity, change and variety, and also to human epistemological and practical limitations, than attempts to cover any field with legislation.

This theory was largely eclipsed in nineteenth-century England by the theory of legal positivism, and with it were eclipsed for a time some useful insights into social complexity and institutional limitations. Also lost was a sense of the complex dialectic between continuity and change in legal and institutionalized traditions. In its best moments, common law theory had such a sense.
Norms, legal
Authors: Bankowski Zenon
Published: September 2018

A legal norm sets a standard of behaviour. As a norm, it thus can remain in existence even though it is broken. Norms can be distinguished from causal laws which need to be reinterpreted if an exception is found. Linguistic signals help us determine what the norm is. Thus ‘ought’, ‘must’, ‘shall’, ‘have to’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, and so on, characteristically belong to the statement of norms, whereas words like ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘were’, ‘will be’ ‘possible’, ‘impossible’ tend to show descriptive rules. These linguistic signals reflect a difference, they do not constitute it. There are many counterexamples: thus ‘swimming is forbidden’ and ‘we ought to be at the col now’ express normativity and description respectively.

Whatever is for someone a standard for their conduct is normative for them. One might say that the idea stems from the notion of measurement. That we ‘run the rule’ over someone or ‘get the measure of them’ stems from the idea of measuring, of imposing a standard on them or on oneself.

Where does the legal norm stem from? There are two main views: the practice theory holds that norms are expressions or articulations of people’s behaviour; the interpretive theory holds that norms are not connected to behaviour in the way the practice theory holds but are the means whereby we make sense of such behaviour. But the connection between the two groups is much closer than appears at first sight.
Gaius (c.110–c.180)
Authors: McLeod Grant
Published: September 2018

Gaius was a great but not a typical classical Roman jurist. His Institutes (c.ad 161), an introductory textbook, is the first known attempt to see Roman law as a systematic whole. His scheme was used by Justinian and so played a central role in subsequent European thought on the classification of law.
Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus (1907–93)
Authors: MacCormick Neil
Published: September 2018

H.L.A. Hart, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, 1952–1968, is an outstanding representative of the analytical approach in jurisprudence and philosophy of law. He restated ‘legal positivism’ in the tradition of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, differentiating between law’s existence and its moral qualities. But he rejected the Benthamite identification of law with a sovereign’s commands, advancing instead a theory of law as comprising a special, systematically organized, kind of social rules. He did this in a linguistic-analytical style, showing how attention to our way of speaking and thinking about rules can yield new insights into their nature.
Jhering, Rudolf von (1818–92)
Authors: Attwooll Elspeth
Published: September 2018

Jhering saw law as a mechanism for achieving current purposes, supplying the compulsion needed where other levers were insufficient to secure the conditions of social life. In this, he took issue with those other nineteenth-century German jurists who regarded law as a settled hierarchy of rules and concepts. He had considerable influence on the development of jurisprudential thought both in Germany and in the USA.
Legal positivism, inclusive versus exclusive
Authors: Waluchow Wilfrid
Published: September 2018

Modern legal positivism views law as a human creation; the existence and content of law are, fundamentally, matters of social fact. This is usually termed ‘the social thesis’. A second thesis integral to the positivist tradition is John Austin’s famous ‘separation thesis’: ‘the existence of law is one thing, its merit or demerit another…’ – there is nothing in the nature of law as a social institution that guarantees its moral worth. Despite a shared commitment to the social and separation theses, defenders of legal positivism differ significantly in their understanding of these fundamental tenets. In response to Ronald Dworkin’s claim that moral principles partly determine the content of legal systems, positivists have divided into two major camps. Inclusive positivists assert that it is conceptually possible, but not necessary, that the legal validity of a norm should depend on its consistency with moral principles or values. Exclusive positivists assert the opposite: the legal validity of a norm can never be a function of its consistency with moral principles or values. Recent debates among positivists have focused on whether inclusive positivism is consistent with the law’s claim to authority and with the role it purports to play in guiding our conduct. Where these debates will lead is, at this stage, an open question.
Coase, Ronald H. (1910–)
Authors: Bix Brian H.
Published: September 2018

Coase’s work reshaped the economic analysis of law and government policy, and began the law-and-economics movement. His writings, over the course of decades, have consistently emphasized the importance to clear economic thinking of observing actual practice. While economic theory had often been grounded on abstract models that assumed the absence of any costs for commercial transactions, Coase has shown how recognizing the pervasive presence of frequently substantial transaction costs in the real world requires rethinking established economic ideas about industrial organization and government regulation.
Williams, Glanville Llewellyn (1911–97)
Authors: Glazebrook P.R.
Published: September 2018

Once said by the criminologist Sir Leon Radzinowicz to have been ‘Jeremy Bentham’s only legitimate descendant’, Glanville Williams was one of the best known and most prolific and astringent academic lawyers of his generation. His principal concern lay in the critical analysis of the rules of English law, but he also did pioneering work in both legal philosophy (anticipating in several key respects the work of H.L.A. Hart) and medical and bio-ethics.
Justice, corrective
Authors: Weinrib Ernest J.
Published: September 2018

In his treatment of justice Aristotle articulated a contrast between two forms of justice, corrective and distributive. The former deals with the rectification of an injustice inflicted by one person on another, the latter with the distribution of benefits or burdens. These forms of justice have differing structures. What informs distributive justice is the notion of comparison: a greater share goes to the more meritorious under the distributive criterion. What informs corrective justice is the notion of correlativity or mutuality: an injurer has inflicted wrongful harm on a victim if and only if the victim has suffered wrongful harm through the injurer’s conduct. The parties, as doer and sufferer of the same injustice, are the active and passive poles of a single wrong, which the law rectifies by holding the perpetrator liable to the victim.

In recent decades corrective justice (along with its differentiation from distributive justice) has attracted the attention of legal theorists interested in tort law as a repository of normative judgements and insights about wrongful injuries. These theorists view the notion of correlativity as crucial for understanding the relationship between the plaintiff and the defendant. An emphasis on correlativity illuminates both the arguments that properly belong within a system of liability and the connection between corrective justice as a theoretical idea and legal liability as a familiar institutional practice. This entry outlines the role of corrective justice in contemporary tort theory.
Analyticity
Authors: Bealer George
Published: September 2018

In Critique of Pure ReasonKant introduced the term ‘analytic’ for judgments whose truth is guaranteed by a certain relation of ‘containment’ between the constituent concepts, and ‘synthetic’ for judgments which are not like this. Closely related terms were found in earlier writings of Locke, Hume and Leibniz. In Kant’s definition, an analytic judgment is one in which ‘the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is (covertly) contained in this concept A’ ([1781/1787] 1965: 48). Kant called such judgments ‘explicative’, contrasting them with synthetic judgments which are ‘ampliative’. A paradigmatic analyticity would be: bachelors are unmarried. Kant assumed that knowledge of analytic necessities has a uniquely transparent sort of explanation. In the succeeding two centuries the terms ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ have been used in a variety of closely related but not strictly equivalent ways. In the early 1950s Morton White (1950) and W.V. Quine (1951) argued that the terms were fundamentally unclear and should be eschewed. Although a number of prominent philosophers have rejected their arguments, there prevails a scepticism about ‘analytic’ and the idea that there is an associated category of necessary truths having privileged epistemic status.
Language, conventionality of
Authors: Smith Barry C.
Published: September 2018

When we say that smoke means fire or that those spots mean measles, we are noting how the presence of one thing indicates the presence of another. For these natural relationships to continue, it is enough that the laws of nature remain the same. The connection between the two states is strictly causal. By contrast when we say, ‘In English, "gold" means this stuff’, pointing at some metal, we are insisting on an arbitrary connection between a piece of language and part of the world. We might have used another word, as other languages do, or have used this word for something else. But, for a word to have the literal meaning it does in a language, this arbitrary connection must be sustained on subsequent occasions of use. What is needed to sustain the connection is an intention on our part, not just the continued operation of natural laws.

Of course, some connections between words and things are based on natural relations; there is, for example, onomatopoeia. However, few words have this feature. For the majority of words it is quite arbitrary that they have the meanings they do, and this has led many to suppose that the regularities needed to sustain the connections between words and what they stand for are conventional rather than causal. But there are also those who deny that convention is an essential feature of language.
Fiction, semantics of
Authors: Howell Robert
Published: September 2018

Taken at face value, ‘Anna Karenina is a woman’ seems true. By using Tolstoi’s name ‘Anna Karenina’ and the predicate ‘is a woman’ we appear to refer to the character Anna and to attribute to her a property which she has. Yet how can this be? There is no actual woman to whom the name refers. Such problems of reference, predication and truth also arise in connection with representational art and with beliefs and other attitudes.

Meinong distinguishes the ‘being’ of objects (including fictional objects) from the ‘existence’ of actual objects such as Napoleon. ‘Anna Karenina’ refers to a concrete, particular, nonexistent object that has the property of womanhood. However, Meinong’s distinction seems to many ontologically suspect. Perhaps, then, being is existence and ‘Anna Karenina is a woman’ is actually false because ‘Anna Karenina’ has no referent. Russell in ‘On Denoting’ (1905) agrees. But how can we explain the apparent contrast in truth between this sentence and the unquestionably erroneous ‘Anna Karenina is from Moscow’? Or is it that being is existence but ‘Anna Karenina’ refers to an abstract, not a concrete, thing – an existent, abstract thing that does not have the property of being a woman but has merely the property of being said, by Tolstoi’s novel, to be a woman? Then, however, the meaning of our sentence about Anna no longer parallels that of ‘Emily Dickinson is a woman’. Perhaps, as many argue, we only pretend that ‘Anna Karenina’ refers and that the sentence is true. This position may not adequately explain the intuitions that support Anna Karenina as a genuine object of reference and predication, however.
Linguistic discrimination
Authors: Scheman Naomi
Published: September 2018

‘Linguistic discrimination’ is a redundancy. Discriminating is at the heart of what languages do. The question, of course, is when they can be said to do it invidiously, or rather when we, in our use of language, can be said to be discriminating invidiously. In Aristotelian terms, the proper use of linguistic discriminations is to make the right sort and number of discriminations in the right ways and at the right times – that is, not to discriminate between those things that, for the legitimate purposes at hand, ought to be seen as the same; to discriminate between those things that, for the legitimate purposes at hand, ought to be seen as different; and to discriminate in ways that advance legitimate and not illegitimate purposes. Disputes about what constitutes linguistic discrimination (in the invidious sense) revolve around both the legitimacy of our purposes and, in the light of those purposes, the aptness of particular discriminations. Such disputes presume both that our language shapes our actions (that linguistic discrimination plays a role in maintaining unjust inequalities) and that our actions can shape our language (that acknowledging such discrimination can and should lead to linguistic change).
Meaning and rule-following
Authors: Smith Barry C.
Published: September 2018

Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following, and the recent responses to it, have been widely regarded as providing the deepest and most challenging issues surrounding the notions of meaning, understanding and intention – central notions in the philosophy of language and mind. The fundamental issue is what it is for words to have meaning, and for speakers to use words in accordance with their meanings. In Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein explores the idea that what could give a word its meaning is a rule for its use, and that to be a competent speaker is to use words in accordance with these rules. His discussion of the nature of rules and rule-following has been highly influential, although there is no general agreement about his conclusions and final position. The view that there is no objectivity to an individual’s attempt to follow a rule in isolation provides one strand of Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language.

To some commentators, Wittgenstein’s discussion only leads to the sceptical conclusion that there are no rules to be followed and so no facts about what words mean. Others have seen him as showing why certain models of what it takes for an individual to follow a rule are inadequate and must be replaced by an appeal to a communal linguistic practice.
Metaphor
Authors: Martinich A.P.
Published: September 2018

A standard dictionary definition describes a metaphor as ‘a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object is used in place of another to suggest a likeness between them’. Although the theoretical adequacy of this definition may be questioned, it conveys the standard view that there is a difference between literal and nonliteral language; that figurative speech is nonliteral language and that a metaphor is an instance of figurative speech.

The three most influential treatments of metaphor are the comparison, interaction and speech act theories. According to the first, every metaphor involves a comparison; a specific version of this view is that every metaphor is an abbreviated simile. According to the second, every metaphor involves a semantic interaction between some object or concept that is literally denoted by some word, and some concept metaphorically predicated on that word. According to the third, it is not words or sentences that are metaphorical but their use in specific situations; thus, to understand how metaphors function, one must understand how people communicate with language.
Questions
Authors: Harrah David
Published: September 2018

Some theorists hold that a question is an interrogative sentence; others that a question is what is meant or expressed by an interrogative sentence. Most theorists hold that each question has two or more answers, and that the point of asking a question is to have the respondent reply with one of the answers. Most hold that each question has an assertive core or presupposition that is implied by each of the answers; if it is false, then no answer is true, so we say that the question commits the fallacy of many questions and we regard the negation of the presupposition as a corrective reply to the question (it corrects the question).

For example, consider the question ‘Has Adam stopped sinning?’ Its answers are ‘Adam has stopped sinning’ and ‘Adam has not stopped sinning’. It presupposes ‘Adam has sinned’; thus ‘Adam has not sinned’ is a corrective reply. The ‘safe’ way to ask this question is via the conditional ‘If Adam has sinned, then has Adam stopped sinning?’

We can construct formal systems for asking whether and which questions in an effective way. Other types of question (for example, who and why) are still problematic. It can be proved that some questions are reducible to others, some questions raise others, and some systems for the logic of questions can never be complete in certain ways.
Language, early modern philosophy of
Authors: Szabo Zoltan Gendler
Published: September 2018

Philosophical interest in language during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was strong but largely derivative. Most thinkers shared Leibniz’s view ‘that languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the significations of words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding’.

The three most important areas of philosophical discussion about language in the modern period were the nature of signification, the origin of human language and the possibility of animal language. Signification was generally viewed as a relation between linguistic signs and ideas. There was no agreement whether signification is entirely conventional or contains a natural element, but the view is that it is entirely natural virtually disappeared. Even those who retained the belief in the possibility of a philosophically perfect language insisted that such a language should be constructed anew, rather than rediscovered as the lost language of Adam. The traditional biblical account of the origin of language was more and more contested but, as more naturalistic theories emerged, the problem of why other animals cannot talk became especially pressing.

Debates about language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were highly speculative; participants in these debates often relied on simplistic biological theories, inadequate grammars or anecdotal evidence from travellers. What makes these discussions important is less their scientific contribution than their engagement with the philosophical problems concerning the relationship between the human mind and the natural world.
Language, social nature of
Authors: Smith Barry C.
Published: September 2018

Language is mostly used in a social setting. We use it to communicate with others. We depend on others when learning language, and we constantly borrow one another’s uses of expression. Language helps us perform various social functions, and many of its uses have become institutionalized. But none of these reflections settle the question of whether language is an essentially social phenomenon. To address this we must consider the nature of language itself, and then ask which social elements, if any, make an essential contribution to its nature.

While many would accept that language is an activity that must take place in a social setting, others have gone further by arguing that language is a social practice. This view commits one to the claim that the meanings of an individual’s words are the meanings they have in the common language. The former view need not accept so strong a claim: meaning depends on social interaction because it is a matter of what one can communicate to others but this does not require the existence of communal languages. A competing conception which rejects the social character of language in either of these versions is the thesis that language is mentally represented in the mind of an individual.
Johnson, Alexander Bryan (1786–1867)
Authors: Fann K.T.
Published: September 2018

Johnson was a self-taught philosophic genius who, completely alone, set out in the 1820s to analyse the nature and limits of language. He was the first thinker who consciously and systematically based his whole approach to philosophical problems on a critique of language. According to Johnson, a knowledge of the nature of language is important because it ‘bears the same relation to all speculative learning as a knowledge of the qualities of drugs bears to the practice of medicine or as a knowledge of perspective and colours bears to painting’ (1854).
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Authors: Lucy John A.
Published: September 2018

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is a widely used label for the linguistic relativity hypothesis, that is, the proposal that the particular language we speak shapes the way we think about the world. The label derives from the names of American anthropological linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who persuasively argued for this idea during the 1930s and 1940s – although they never actually characterized their ideas as an ’hypothesis’. In contrast to earlier European scholarship concerned with linguistic relativity, their approach was distinguished by first-hand experience with native American languages and rejection of claims for the superiority of European languages.
Language, ancient philosophy of
Authors: Shields Christopher
Published: September 2018

The earliest interest in language during the ancient Greek period was largely instrumental: presumed facts about language and its features were pressed into service for the purpose of philosophical argumentation. Perhaps inevitably, this activity gave way to the analysis of language for its own sake. Claims, for example, about the relation between the semantic values of general terms and the existence of universals invited independent inquiry into the nature of the meanings of those general terms themselves. Language thus became an object of philosophical inquiry in its own right. Accordingly, philosophers at least from the time of Plato conducted inquiries proper to philosophy of language. They investigated:

- how words acquire their semantic values;

- how proper names and other singular terms refer;

- how words combine to form larger semantic units;

- the compositional principles necessary for language understanding;

- how sentences, statements, or propositions come to be truth-evaluable;

and, among later figures of the classical period,

- (6) how propositions, as abstract, mind- and language-independent entities, are to be (a) characterized in terms of their constituents, (b) related to minds and the natural languages used to express them, and (c) related to the language-independent world.
Focus
Authors: Glanzberg Michael
Published: September 2018

Focus is the name of the phenomenon we typically see marked in English by putting stress on a word or phrase, as in:

- (1) John kissed JANE.

Focus triggers a number of effects. It indicates contrast. Sentence (1) indicates that John kissed Jane as opposed to Sally or Yolanda. This is typically described as a pragmatic effect, resulting from the way the content of the sentence is presented. But in some important cases, focus can affect the truth conditions of sentences, and so must be in part a semantic phenomenon. Focus also affects where and how ellipsis works, and so it relates to syntax as well. Finally, focus affects whether an answer to a question is felicitous. Answers to questions with the focus in the wrong place sound decidedly odd to speakers. Patterns of questions and answers often show how discourses are organized, and so focus plays an important role in discourse structure. Focus is thus a locus of interaction for major components of language, including pragmatics and discourse, semantics, syntax and phonology. As such it has been of interest to linguists, and to philosophers of language interested in how these components of language may be delineated and how they interact. Effects like contrast and felicity of question-answer pairs have also made focus of interest to philosophers interested in explanation and knowledge.
Type-logical semantics
Authors: Muskens Reinhard
Published: September 2018

Type-logical semantics studies linguistic meaning with the help of the theory of types. The latter originated with Russell as an answer to the paradoxes, but has the additional virtue that it is very close to ordinary language. In fact, type theory is so much more similar to language than predicate logic is, that adopting it as a vehicle of representation can overcome the mismatches between grammatical form and predicate logical form that were observed by Frege and Russell. The grammatical forms of ordinary language sentences consequently may be taken to be much less misleading than logicians in the first half of the twentieth century often thought them to be. This was realized by Richard Montague, who used the theory of types to translate fragments of ordinary language into a logical language.

Semantics is commonly divided into lexical semantics, which studies the meaning of words, and compositional semantics, which studies the way in which complex phrases obtain a meaning from their constituents. The strength of type-logical semantics lies with the latter, but type-logical theories can be combined with many competing hypotheses about lexical meaning, provided these hypotheses are expressed using the language of type theory.