A long series of studies in social psychology have shown that the explanations people give for their own behaviors are fundamentally different from the explanations they give for the behaviors of others. Still, a great deal of uncertainty remains about precisely what sorts of differences one finds here. We offer a new approach to addressing the problem. Specifically, we distinguish between two levels of representation ─ the level of linguistic structure (which consists of the actual series of words used in (...) the explanation) and the level of conceptual structure (which consists of the concepts these words are used to express). We then formulate and test hypotheses both about self-other differences in conceptual structure and about self-other differences in the mapping from conceptual structure to linguistic structure. (shrink)

An axiomatization of the theory is presented based on an explication of the 1957 text. Twenty-five theorems are deduced from the seven postulates. An abstract test space for the theory is formulated and the operations for its practical testing discussed. Traditional experimentation with the theory seems generally concerned with few of its propositions and incapable of testing it.

Psychology ought to describe how and explain why we human beings live our lives as we do, which necessarily comes down to how and why we engage in the actions and have the subjective experiencings that we do. Our physical actions are themselves in part subjective phenomena, because actions are not simply body movements but also essentially involve intentions, beliefs about specific causation, and a sense of voluntariness. Thus, whatever else it is, psychology is inescapably the science of explaining the (...) personally subjective. It is time for psychology to openly embrace its subjective subject-matter as such, which would open up a vast domain still waiting to be systematically studied. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics yields a quantum potential, Q. In his early work, the effects of Q are understood in causal terms as acting through a real (quantum) field which pushes particles around. In his later work (with Basil Hiley), the causal understanding of Q appears to have been abandoned. The purpose of this paper is to understand how the use of certain metaphors leads Bohm away from a causal treatment of Q, and to evaluate the use of (...) those metaphors. (shrink)

This 1994 book constitutes a sustained, comprehensive, and rigorous critique of contemporary Hobbesian contractarianism as expounded in the work of Jean Hampton, Gregory Kavka, and David Gauthier. Professor Kraus argues that the attempts by these three philosophers to use Hobbes to answer current political and moral questions fail. The reasons why they fail are related to fundamental problems intrinsic to Hobbesian contractarianism: first, the problem of collective action arising out of the tension in Hobbes's theory between individual and collective (...) rationality; second, the classical problem of explaining the normative force of hypothetical action, a problem that can be traced to the conflicting strategies of hypothetical justification found in Rawls's and Hobbes's theories. Given the deep interest in Hobbesian contractarianism among philosophers, political theorists, game theorists in economics and political science, and legal theorists, this book is likely to attract wide attention and infuse life into the contractarian debate. (shrink)

One style of conducting scientific research involves the application of theoretical propositions to an empirical domain under investigation. The investigator plans his research in terms of the theoretical propositions and states his findings in these terms as well. We wish to examine not the merits of this style of research but a difficulty inherent in it. The difficulty concerns what is to be done when disconfirmative results are produced by some discrete study or experiment in the course of such research.

This collection, first published in 2000, brings together essays by some of the most prominent scholars currently writing in commercial law theory. The essays address the foundations of efficiency analysis as the dominant theoretical paradigm in contemporary corporate and commercial law scholarship. Some of the questions addressed in the volume are: What are the historical roots of efficiency analysis in contract, sales, and corporate law? Is moral theory irrelevant to efficiency analysis in these areas; if relevant, are morality and efficiency (...) compatible? Even if efficiency is otherwise reasonable as a normative goal in corporate and commercial law, does the complexity of efficiency make it practical to administer in adjudication? What is the best way of pursuing efficiency in corporate and commercial law? The volume reflects the most exciting work being done in contemporary legal theory. It will be of interest to professionals and students in law and philosophy of law. (shrink)

(Statement of Responsibility) by Timothy S. Huebner.

The idea that legal theories seek not only to explain but to evaluate the moral justification of particular areas of law is quite familiar. Yet little attention has been paid to the minimal criteria of adequacy for justificatory legal theories. Whereas many theories claim to identify the moral grounds that justify a particular area of law, such as contracts or torts, none of them explains how its justification determines the outcomes of adjudication governed by the law in that area. In (...) this brief Essay for the William and Mary Law Review Symposium on Law and Morality, I argue that a particular area of law can be justified only by identifying moral reasons that fully determine the results of adjudication. No matter how compelling the moral reasons a legal theory identifies, and how tight the fit between those reasons and the structure and content of the legal rules governing a judicial decision, a legal theory fails to justify a particular area of law if the reasoning it identifies falls short of fully determining the results in the judicial decisions governed by that law. Though this bold claim may seem unrealistic, I argue that legal theories can satisfy this determinacy requirement by identifying determinate but inconclusive reasoning that explains outcomes in adjudication. While such reasoning may prove to be erroneous, that does not undermine its justificatory force. (shrink)

Sieht man von Gustave de Beaumont ab, mit dem er die Amerikareise antrat, und von Louis de Kergorlay, so war sicherlich Jean-Jacques Ampère der engste Freund Tocquevilles. Er besaß im Schloss Tocqueville ein für ihn bestimmtes Quartier und wurde stets mit großer Freude von Tocqueville und seiner Frau empfangen.

Even though morally competent artificial agents have yet to emerge in society, we need insights from empirical science into how people will respond to such agents and how these responses should inform agent design. Three survey studies presented participants with an artificial intelligence agent, an autonomous drone, or a human drone pilot facing a moral dilemma in a military context: to either launch a missile strike on a terrorist compound but risk the life of a child, or to cancel the (...) strike to protect the child but risk a terrorist attack. Seventy-two percent of respondents were comfortable making moral judgments about the AI in this scenario and fifty-one percent were comfortable making moral judgments about the autonomous drone. These participants applied the same norms to the two artificial agents and the human drone pilot. However, people ascribed different patterns of blame to humans and machines as a function of the agent’s decision of how to solve the dilemma. These differences in blame seem to stem from different assumptions about the agents’ embeddedness in social structures and the moral justifications those structures afford. Specifically, people less readily see artificial agents as embedded in social structures and, as a result, they explained and justified their actions differently. As artificial agents will perform many actions with moral significance, we must heed such differences in justifications and blame and probe how they affect our interactions with those agents. (shrink)

End-of-life decision-making in patients with dementia is a complex topic. Belgium and the Netherlands have been at the forefront of legislative advancement and progressive societal changes concerning the perspectives toward physician-assisted death (PAD). Careful consideration of clinical and social aspects is essential during the end-of-life decision-making process in patients with dementia. Geriatric assent provides the physician, the patient and his family the opportunity to end life with dignity. Unbearable suffering, decisional competence, and awareness of memory deficits are among the clinical (...) considerations that physicians should incorporate during the end-of-life decision-making process. However, as other societies introduce legislature granting the right of PAD, new social determinants should be considered; Mexico City is an example. Current perspectives regarding advance euthanasia directives (AED) and PAD in patients with dementia are evolving. A new perspective that hinges on the role of the family and geriatric assent should help culturally heterogeneous societies in the transition of their public health care policies regarding end-of-life choices. (shrink)

As the pre-eminent Enlightenment philosopher, Kant famously calls on all humans to make up their own minds, independently from the constraints imposed on them by others. Kant's focus, however, is on universal human reason, and he tells us little about what makes us individual persons. In this book, Katharina T. Kraus explores Kant's distinctive account of psychological personhood by unfolding how, according to Kant, we come to know ourselves as such persons. Drawing on Kant's Critical works and on his (...) Lectures and Reflections, Kraus develops the first textually comprehensive and systematically coherent account of our capacity for what Kant calls 'inner experience'. The novel view of self-knowledge and self-formation in Kant that she offers addresses present-day issues in philosophy of mind and will be relevant for contemporary philosophical debates. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of philosophy, as well as of philosophy of mind and psychology. (shrink)

In his classic monograph, The Death of Contract, Grant Gilmore argued that Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Samuel Williston trumped up the legal credentials for their classical bargain theory of contract law. Gilmore's analysis has been subjected to extensive criticism, but its specific, sustained, and fundamental charge that the bargain theory was based on a fraudulent misrepresentation of precedential authority has never been questioned. In this Essay, I argue that Gilmore's case against the classical theorists rests on the (...) suppressed premise that the precedential authority of cases resides in the express judicial reasoning used to decide them. In contrast, I argue that the classical theorists implicitly presuppose that the precedential authority of cases consists in the best theory that explains their outcomes, even if that theory is inconsistent with the case's express judicial reasoning. The classical view of precedential authority completely defuses Gilmore's charge of fraud. In Gilmore's view, merely demonstrating the inconsistency between the proposition for which the classical theorists cited a case and the express reasoning in that case suffices as proof of misrepresentation. But in the classical theorists' view, the express reasoning in a case is simply a theory of its precedential authority, which, like any theory, can be wrong. Thus, the classical theorists simply reject Gilmore's claim that a case cannot properly be cited for a proposition inconsistent with its express reasoning. The real dispute, then, between Gilmore and the classical theorists is over the nature of precedential authority and not the content of contract law. Having reframed the classic death-of-contract debate, I then trace these competing conceptions of precedential authority through the major schools of contemporary contract theory. I argue that a contract theory's embrace of one view instead of the other can be explained by the relative priority it accords to each of the two components in a conception of adjudicative legitimacy. A conception of adjudicative legitimacy consists in a theory of what it means for a decision to be based on law and a theory of what is required for law to be justified. I explain why theories according priority to the former tend to subscribe to the precedents-as-outcomes view, while theories according priority to the latter tend to favor the express reasoning view. The Essay concludes by arguing that the economic analysis of contract law subscribes to the precedents-as-outcomes view and therefore is the contemporary jurisprudential successor to the late nineteenth-century classical theorists. (shrink)

Explanatory economic analysis of the common law has long been subject to deep philosophical skepticism for two reasons. First, common law decisions appear to be cast in the language of deontic morality, not the consequentialist language of efficiency. For this reason, philosophers have claimed that explanatory economic analysis cannot satisfy the transparency criterion, which holds that a legal theory's explanation must provide a plausible account of the relationship between the reasoning it claims judges actually use to decide cases and the (...) express reasoning judges provide in their opinions. Philosophers have doubted that the economic analysis has a plausible account of why judges would use deontic moral terms to explain cases they decide using consequentialist economic reasoning, arguing instead that only a deontic moral account of judicial reasoning can be squared with the judicial use of deontic moral language. Second, the common law has a bilateral structure, in which a plaintiff's right to recover and a defendant's duty to compensate are treated as correlative. Philosophers have observed that this structure seems custom tailored to retrospective moral rights adjudication and ill suited to prospective efficient regulation. Recently, two philosophers, Jules L. Coleman and Stephen A. Smith, have developed these ideas into a full-scale assault on the explanatory credentials of the economic analysis. I defend the economic analysis by arguing that the bilateral structure of the common law either constitutes a "second best" approach to providing incentives for efficient behavior, as economic analysts have maintained, or that it is the vestigial remnant of the common law's originally deontic conception. I also claim that the economic analysis satisfies the transparency criterion by arguing that terms with a deontic plain meaning have acquired a consequentialist contextual meaning within the common law. Although this "contextualist convergence" thesis is counterintuitive, I build on Coleman's semantic theory to explain how it is possible. To demonstrate that it is plausible as well, I argue that evolutionary forces would have naturally led to this result over the course of the common law's development. In particular, I claim that the substantial indeterminacy of deontic moral theory, and the superior determinacy of the economic analysis, explains why judges would be intuitively attracted to reasoning that is best reconstructed in economic terms, notwithstanding the superior normative force of deontic moral theory. Thus, the core of my defense of explanatory economic analysis is that its critics overlook the central theoretical and practical role determinacy plays in explanation and justification generally, and in the explanation of judicial reasoning in particular, where determinacy is prized, if not above all else, no less than any other virtue. (shrink)

Robot ethics encompasses ethical questions about how humans should design, deploy, and treat robots; machine morality encompasses questions about what moral capacities a robot should have and how these capacities could be computationally implemented. Publications on both of these topics have doubled twice in the past 10 years but have often remained separate from one another. In an attempt to better integrate the two, I offer a framework for what a morally competent robot would look like and discuss a number (...) of ethical questions about the design, use, and treatment of such moral robots in society. Instead of searching for a fixed set of criteria of a robot’s moral competence I identify the multiple elements that make up human moral competence and probe the possibility of designing robots that have one or more of these human elements, which include: moral vocabulary; a system of norms; moral cognition and affect; moral decision making and action; moral communication. Juxtaposing empirical research, philosophical debates, and computational challenges, this article adopts an optimistic perspective: if robotic design truly commits to building morally competent robots, then those robots could be trustworthy and productive partners, caretakers, educators, and members of the human community. Moral competence does not resolve all ethical concerns over robots in society, but it may be a prerequisite to resolve at least some of them. (shrink)

ETUDES DE PHILOLOGIE ET D'HISTOIRE Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach Voltaire's Old Testament Criticism 1971 - LIBRAIRIE DROZ- GENEVE ...