Can or must political liberals recognize any form of legal marriage? If so, on what grounds and what type of marriage can they recognize? Elizabeth Brake argues that political liberals can and must support the social bases of adult caring relationships through the public recognition and support of minimal marriage. She thinks that political liberals cannot recognize a more robust form of marriage than her minimal marriage. Clare Chambers argues that the state should abolish legal marriage and replace it with (...) the marriage-free state, which endorses piecemeal practice-based personal relationship laws. In this thesis, I will argue that the marriage-free state is superior to minimal marriage even in an ideal society because the marriage-free state can secure the rights and entitlements that are important for minimal marriage and do so in a way that is more inclusive of vulnerable persons. (shrink)

Previous research has found no consistent relationship between measures of disconfirmatory evidence, alternative hypotheses, and people's success in rule-discovery tasks. The present paper explores falsification's inductive benefit under the ?context of discovery? in Wason's 2?4?6 task by developing a new type of alternative hypothesis, which we label the ?new-perspective hypothesis?. Experiment 1 found that falsification is effective only when a new-perspective hypothesis is generated, rather than a same-perspective hypothesis. The total number of alternative hypotheses was also unrelated to rule-discovery success. (...) Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 but included the addition of a different name-content task as well as two levels of task difficulty. The main findings were similar to those for Experiment 1, and the new-perspective hypothesis was observed to be most important for the difficult rule-discovery task. These results help to clarify the important ways new-perspective hypotheses and disconfirmatory evidence contribute to successful rule-discovery performance. (shrink)