Democracy has recently been criticized by several philosophers on grounds of poor epistemic performance. The proposed alternative – epistocracy – faces criticism for failing to uphold and express the core democratic values of civic equality and individual autonomy. In response, proposals have been offered that try to achieve epistocratic performance while retaining democratic inclusion. This paper raises two problems for such proposals, relating to the selection of experts and the incentive-compatibility of the system. Given these failures, I sketch what I (...) call the Wiki-Model. I argue that the Wiki-Model has desirable epistemic properties; realizes our democratic ideals; while also avoiding the two problems that other hybrid models face. (shrink)

Proponents of political experiments in living, such as Elizabeth Anderson and Ryan Muldoon, often emphasize their potential to generate useful observational data about the relation between social rules and ethically desirable outcomes. This paper highlights another epistemic dimension of political experiments: their potential to transform the cognitive perspectives of participants. I argue that this transformative dimension of experimentation offers an endogenous societal mechanism for increasing perspectival diversity. I explore the implications of this mechanism for institutional design.

The ideal of publicity plays an important role in contemporary legal and political philosophy. Yet, to date, it has not been brought to bear on the question of voting method choice. This paper aims to fix this. I argue that voting method publicity is a well-motivated requirement which reveals tradeoffs inherent to democracy between procedural and epistemic equality. I further explore the implications of voting method publicity to the normative status of plurality voting and its possible alternatives.

A number of liberal and libertarian philosophers make the moral case for laissez-faire polycentricity—a political order centered around voluntary association. Some of these philosophers further present epistemic arguments in favor of polycentric forms of organization. Initially, one might think that the epistemic arguments reinforce the moral ones, resulting in a philosophically robust case for laissez-faire polycentricity. This paper argues against this conclusion. Through examining the intersection between epistemic considerations and institutional arrangements, I show that the epistemic arguments point away from (...) laissez-faire polycentricity and toward alternative forms of polycentric order. (shrink)

The present offers a pragmatic solution of the Heap Paradox, based on the idea that vague predicates are “indexical” in the sense that their denotation does not only depend on the context of their use, but it is a function of the context. The analysis is based on the following three claims. The borderlines of vague terms are undetermined in the sense that though they may be determined in some contexts, they may differ from one context to the next. Vagueness (...) serves the important communicative function, enabling speakers to identify entities as objects (as things we can talk about) in terms of some quantitative differences between the “object” and its background in the context. Thus, in some contexts we can naturally partition the group of men uniquely so as to distinguish the bald from the not-bald. Whether a man with a given hair number is among the bald in a given context depends not only on his own hair number but also on the hair number of others in that context. This provides the background for the claim that when we assert that John is bald, we presuppose that there is a unique demarcation to the bald in that context. I consider the truth of the Paradox’s statements in contexts where the presupposition is true and in contexts where it is false. The analysis yields that the contradiction is avoided because though each of the statements is often true, never are all the sentences in the Paradox true together. (shrink)

In recent decades, theories of representation have undergone a constructivist turn, as many theorists no longer view the represented subject as prior to but rather as an effect of representation. Whereas some critics have claimed that lacking an ontologically pre-given subject undermines the theory of representation, many democratic theorists have sought to reconceptualize representation and its democratic possibilities by turning away from ontological questions altogether. By focusing instead on how representatives come to know the public interest, many scholars now contend (...) that an epistemological account best explains how political representation can foster democratic participation. Yet, theorists of representation have not assessed whether this turn to epistemology has overcome the ontological problems that initially motivated it. This article tracks epistemological defenses of representation to outline two models of political representation that attempt to tackle the epistemological problem of constituent interest without positing a foundational ontology of the subject. I argue that both theoretical tendencies ultimately remain caught in the problems of ontology, thereby undercutting their normative aspirations to foster political participation. Turning to Hannah Arendt’s comments on public interest and her writings on council democracy, the article retheorizes the concept of political representation to avoid the ontological problems that beset current accounts. (shrink)

A commonly deployed signifier to render the political event of a riot intelligible, ‘chaos’ describes an affective condition of disorder and disarray. For some theorists of affect, such a condition of chaotic unpredictability suggests emancipatory potential. Recounting the 2018 May Day / May 1st protests in Paris, that both politicians and media declared to be a riot, this paper argues that to consider the riot as chaotic is to think and feel like a state. Critically interrogating the analytical purchase of (...) ‘chaos’ to describe a riotous assembly of bodies, this paper contends that ‘chaos’ is not only a theoretically impoverished concept to understand such political events, but also that sovereignty mobilizes ‘chaos’ as an affective infrastructure of governance to shore up attachment to the security state. Repudiating the sovereign logic of chaos, this paper presents a first-person encounter with a protest-declared-riot in order to explore the various affects that materialize around such events. Through ethnographic reflection, this paper outlines a series of affects that accompanied the day’s events, such as speculative optimism, fragility, suspicion, fear, boldness, and joy. In so doing, the paper develops an affective approach to theorize relations of political antagonism in the street, arguing that whereas the state weaponizes terror as a form of governance, the rioters weaponize joy as an affective means of resistance. (shrink)

The main object of this paper is to provide the logical machinery needed for a viable basis for talking of the ‘consequences’, the ‘content’, or of ‘equivalences’ between inconsistent sets of premisses.With reference to its maximal consistent subsets (m.c.s.), two kinds of ‘consequences’ of a propositional set S are defined. A proposition P is a weak consequence (W-consequence) of S if it is a logical consequence of at least one m.c.s. of S, and P is an inevitable consequence (I-consequence) of (...) S if it is a logical consequence of all the m.c.s. of S. The set of W-consequences of a set S it determines (up to logical equivalence) its m.c.s. (This enables us to define a normal form for every set such that any two sets having the same W-consequences have the same normal form.) The W-consequences and I-consequences will not do to define the ‘content’ of a set S. The first is too broad, may include propositions mutually inconsistent, the second is too narrow. A via media between these concepts is accordingly defined: P is a P-consequence of S, where P is some preference criterion yielding some of the m.c.s. of S as preferred to others, and P is a consequence of all of the P-preferred m.c.s. of S. The bulk of the paper is devoted to discussion of various preference criteria, and also surveys the application of this machinery in diverse contexts - for example, in connection with the processing of mutually inconsistent reports. (shrink)

The study of the meanings of temporal expressions in natural language can proceed in two ways. The first consists of borrowing an ontological theory concerning how time “really” is, and then showing how temporal expressions are interpreted in this model. Let us call this the physicalist approach. The other approach is to start off by studying the temporal presuppositions employed in the language, and defining a model as the structure which satisfies these conditions. This approach we shall call the analytist (...) approach. The two approaches share their goal, which is to provide a temporal model for natural language. However, they are driven by different motivations. The physicalist approach is ontology-driven. It views time as part of reality, and its structure as independent of linguistic considerations. It attempts to interpret the language in this model, possibly by adding assumptions about the language. The analytist approach, on the other hand, is language driven. It assumes that language “mirrors” reality to the extent in which it is describable in the language, and tries to define a temporal model based only on linguisticconsiderations. A theory is “complete”, in a sense, if it combines both approaches and its (analytist) language- driven model can be constructed in a (physicalist) ontology-driven structure. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against a sharp separation of semantics from pragmatics. While it may be useful to consider semantics independently of pragmatics, in some cases this strategy may lead us astray. First, I make a methodological point. Competing semantic analyses are often presented as supported by competing semantic intuitions of native speakers. Functional considerations are pragmatic considerations which should affect our choice of semantics. These are inferences from the linguistic goals the speakers actually achieve to the meanings their (...) expressions must therefore have. Second, there are linguistic expressions whose semantic meaning is a function of their pragmatic uses. I consider two examples. First, the logicians' debate over the universal analysis of conditionals in natural language. The participants in the debate all ignore conditional forms other than the assertoric and subjunctive. In particular they ignore the conditional speech-act reading. The meaning of the conditional is related to its function: to restrict the commitment of a given speech-act to special conditions. A functional proof of the existence of such conditionals is given, thus showing that the different semantics account only for part of the relevant facts. The second example concerns vague terms. I claim that one of their main uses is to help us identify objects by reference not to their absolute properties but relative to their background. This function cannot be performed by the use of non-vague terms. Vague terms are context dependent and may in some contexts be used non-vaguely and refer to distinct objects in the discourse domain. In a way, what these terms end up denoting is a function of the use of predicates to partition a given domain. (shrink)

Although taking place mainly in the private sector, the French arms industry is a very tightly controlled activity, and decision making on arms exports are made within a genera! framework which takes info account the chief aspects of France global policy.Mercantile considerations are not the main factor in French arms exports. Actually, France has used very counsciously and systematically its arms exports to further its global policy, especially its ambition to build Europe around itself.However, the effective contribution of these arms (...) exports to the attainment of France main goals has been rather dubious and volatile. (shrink)

We consider question-answer dialogues between participants who may disagree with each other. The main problems are: (a) How different speech-acts affect the information in the dialogue; and (b) How to represent what was said in a dialogue, so that we can summarize it even when it involves disagreements (i.e., inconsistencies).We use a fully-typed many-sorted language L with a possible-worlds semantics. L contains nominals representing short answers. The speech-acts are uniformly represented in a dialogue language DL by focus structures, consisting of (...) a mood operator, a topic component and a focus component. Each stage of the dialogue is associated with a set of information functions (g-functions), which are partial functions taking a topic component (representing a question raised) to a set of propositions determined by the corresponding focus component (to the set of answers given to it). (shrink)

The Traditional Kerala Manor: Architecture of a South Indian Catuḥśāla House. By Henri Schildt. Institut français de Pondichéry / École française d’Extrême-Orient, Collection Indologie, no. 117. Pondicherry: Institut français de Pondichéry / École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2012. Pp. xiv + 473, 436 plates. 1400 Rs., €60.

The Avaldsnes Royal Manor project explores early kingship in Northern Europe, spanning the period c. AD–1320 AD. The principal case is the Norwegian kingdom and the core site is Avaldsnes near Haugesund, Western Norway. 9th–10th century skaldic poems as well as 13th century sagas implies that Avaldsnes was the principal Viking Age royal manor. The site has produced numerous exquisite gravefinds from the Roman period onwards. Among them are the third century Flaghaug grave and two ship graves from (...) the late 8th century. Also, the Oseberg ship, excavated near Oslo, is now proven to have been built c. 820 near Avaldsnes. The Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, excavated the Avaldsnes settlement in 2011–12. A team of 23 scholars from prominent academic institutions, including the University of Cambridge and University College London, participate in the research. This first of two volumes contains their results regarding the manor and its setting on the island of Kǫrmt by the Norðvegr, the sheltered sailing route along the West-Scandinavian coast. Together, the chapters produce a detailed 1000-years’ history of a complex central-place area, its monuments and buildings, its activities and functions, its blooming and fading, and eventually its downfall in the 14th century. (shrink)

In [BAT 00b], the flat Rescher–Manor consequence relations — the Free, Strong, Argued, C-Based, andWeak consequence relation—were shown to be characterized by inconsistency-adaptive logics defined from the paraconsistent logic CLuN. This provided these consequence relations with a dynamic proof theory. In the present paper we show that the detour via an inconsistency-adaptive logic is not necessary. We present a direct dynamic proof theory, formulated in the language of Classical Logic, and prove its adequacy. The present paper contains the first (...) direct dynamic proof theory for consequence relations that are characterized by an adaptive logic. (shrink)

This volume, in memory of Ruth Manor, consists of articles presented at her memorial conference at Tel Aviv University. The articles, by colleagues and students, friends and family represent the wide range of interest and expertise that Manor brought to her teaching and research - from formal logic to pragmatics, and from rhetoric to ethics. The collection includes articles by Jaakko Hintikka, Arnon Avron, Oron Shagrir, Eli Dresner, Eran Guter, Amnon Wolman, Anat Matar, and Anat Biletzki. Emblematic of (...) Manor's hugh panoply of philosophical themes, the diversity and variety of subjects covered also portray her analytical profundity and logical proficiency at always seeing connections'. (shrink)

I made two claims against CE. First, that under careful analysis, CE compels us to bring about states of affairs so unacceptable that the position becomes absurd. By virtue of its very conceptual structure, CE gives us manifestly wrong instructions. Second, that CE’s hope of reconciling a strong egalitarianism with robust personal choice and something like the prevailing market economy is a chimera. Manor’s paper does not dispute my second claim. Indeed, his own claim, that in fact CE leads (...) to something close to strict equality, supports my pessimism about CE’s reconciliation project. My reply to Manor therefore focuses on his denial of my first claim, that choice-egalitarianism leads to absurdity. (shrink)

The DangShi manor is located in Hejiashi Village, Baijiajian Town approximately 20 kilometers from the southeast part of Suide County, Shaanxi Province, the unique architecture in Qing Dynasty that has been preserved almost intact in Suide County, a great cultural county, and is an officially protected site in Shaanxi Province. By means of field survey, mapping and taking photos and recording in Dangshi manor, this article acquires the abundant first-hand data about carving art of the manor. With (...) the methods of comparison and induction from the holistic perspective and detailed analysis in the local perspective, this article makes a meticulous analysis and study on the style, content, connotation, moulding and technique of carving art of Dangshi manor and discusses characteristics and protection and inheritance value of carving art of Dangshi manor in a systematic way. (shrink)

This book looks at the television saga Downton Abbey to explore a variety of interpersonal issues that are still relevant today. This includes the emotional importance of particular places; how war and epidemics tell us about life in peacetime and in good health; as well as manners, women's roles, class and more.