The paper is concerned with the introduction of computerized systems into public administration. As a basis for the assessment of current systems, a brief history of such systems is offered. Not only are “legal information systems” discussed, but the access to factual information is also dealt with. Three generations of systems in public administration are indicated: The first generation emphasized use of data bases and computers for calculation, as well as “computer‐oriented legislation.” The second generation lifted the forms, which structure (...) the case work, onto the computer screens. And the third generation is being born from the current efforts to design integrated work stations, using knowledge based methods. On this background, a discussion of impact on legal decision‐making is offered, emphasizing the replacement of vague by strict criteria, and the re‐use of pre‐collected factual information. A final note addresses the problem of reviewing or supervising such systems. (shrink)

Jon Bing was not only a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and law and the legal regulation of technology. He was also an accomplished author of fiction, with an oeuvre spanning from short stories and novels to theatre plays and even an opera. As reality catches up with the imagination of science fiction writers who have anticipated a world shared by humans and non-human intelligences of their creation, some of the copyright issues he has discussed in his (...) academic capacity take on new resonance. How will we regulate copyright when robots are producers and consumers of art? This paper tries to give a sketch of the problem and hints at possible answers that are to a degree inspired by Bing’s academic and creative writing. (shrink)

This paper connects to Jon Bing’s great vision of an integrated national legal information system. The intention of this paper is to variegate Bing’s vision of an integrated information system by shifting the focus to the lay users, thus to those, who are subject to the law. The modified vision is an integrated information system that supports intelligible access to law for the citizens. This presupposes however an unambiguous and transparent legal system. Accordingly, it is also stressed that (...) intelligent legal knowledge engineering has high potential to increase precision and rationality in law, and hence safeguard the predictability of law and legal certainty. The central hypothesis is that putting the person who is subject to the law at the centre provides more rational reason to aim for the greatest possible precision of law by exploiting the means and technologies of our time than to uphold strategic vagueness. On this basis, the paper proposes the development of a basic set of controllable and justiciable basic legal drafting standards on EU and on national level, and promotes a transparency by design approach for legal knowledge engineering in order to enhance precision, integrity, comprehensibility and accessibility of law. Similarly to Jon Bing’s vision, this modified vision of an integrated legal information systems is, most probably, also likely to remain unfulfilled. However, what would science be without visions and (science) fictions? (shrink)

The ubiquity of the Internet has given rise to new hybrid types of online users such as hybrid consumers and prosumers. This paper looks at some of the new legal challenges raised by the exciting opportunities for active participation and co-creation by such users in electronic commerce transactions. The method employed, in homage to Jon Bing, is to look back in time to understand how users in sales transactions have been progressively regarded—alternatively exposed to risk, alternatively protected—and how contract (...) law has adapted to such new developments. The paper shows that, even following the emergence of the hybrid consumer and the prosumer, there are strong arguments for the consumer’s continued protection, not least because of the increase in technological sophistication and complexity. The paper seeks to test somewhat the limits where consumer protection ends and where general contract law—with its attendant doctrines like caveat emptor—would apply again with respect to the aforementioned new users. (shrink)

This book brings together several directions of work in model theory between the late 1950s and early 1980s.

Bringing together powerful new tools from set theory and the philosophy of language, this book proposes a solution to one of the few unresolved paradoxes from antiquity, the Paradox of the Liar. Treating truth as a property of propositions, not sentences, the authors model two distinct conceptions of propositions: one based on the standard notion used by Bertrand Russell, among others, and the other based on J.L. Austin's work on truth. Comparing these two accounts, the authors show that while the (...) Russellian conception of the relation between sentences, propositions, and truth is crucially flawed in limiting cases, the Austinian perspective has fruitful applications to the analysis of semantic paradox. In the course of their study of a language admitting circular reference and containing its own truth predicate, Barwise and Etchemendy also develop a wide range of model-theoretic techniques--based on a new set-theoretic tool, Peter Aczel's theory of hypersets--that open up new avenues in logical and formal semantics. (shrink)

Fine (2012) is a pluralist about grounding. He holds that there are three fundamentally distinct notions of grounding: metaphysical, normative, and natural. Berker (2017) argues for monism on the grounds that the pluralist cannot account for certain principles describing how the distinct notions of grounding interact. This paper defends pluralism. By building on work by Fine (2010) and Litland (2015) I show how the pluralist can systematically account for Berker's interaction principles.

The paper analyses Benardete's paradox of the gods from a more general perspective (the convergence approach) than several of the most important proposals made to date, but in close relation (and sharp contrast) with them. The new theory, based on the notion of limit, is systematically applicable in different possible scenarios involving a denumerable infinity of objects. In particular, it reveals in what way ω-consistency can be compromised in an otherwise consistent description of such "infinitary" situations.

ABSTRACT The article aims at contributing to the unification of history and psychology by studying the expressions of anger and enthusiasm in several historical contexts. These mainly include France and America in the eighteenth century, but also more recent episodes of transitional justice. In addition it aims at drawing the attention of psychologist to the understudied emotion of enthusiasm. To this end, it also considers how Hume and Kant treated this emotion.

Preface This volume represents the proceedings of the Second Conference on Situation Theory and its Applications, held at Loch Rannoch, Scotland, ...

Preservation and interpolation results are obtained for L ∞ω and sublogics $\mathscr{L} \subseteq L_{\infty\omega}$ such that equivalence in L can be characterized by suitable back-and-forth conditions on sets of partial isomorphisms.

A supertask is a process in which an infinite number of individuated actions are performed in a finite time. A Newtonian supertask is one that obeys Newton's laws of motion. Such supertasks can violate energy and momentum conservation and can exhibit indeterministic behavior. Perez Laraudogoitia, who proposed several Newtonian supertasks, uses a local, i.e., particle-by-particle, analysis to obtain these and other paradoxical properties of Newtonian supertasks. Alper and Bridger use a global analysis, embedding the system of particles in a Banach (...) space, to determine the origin of the strange behavior. This paper provides a common framework for the discussion of both the local and global methods of analysis. Using this single framework, the areas of disagreement and agreement are made explicit. Further examples of supertasks are proposed to illuminate various aspects of the discussion. (shrink)

This article develops the Pure Logic of Iterated Full Ground (PLIFG), a logic of ground that can deal with claims of the form “ϕ grounds that (ψ grounds θ)”—what we call iterated grounding claims. The core idea is that some truths Γ ground a truth ϕ when there is an explanatory argument (of a certain sort) from premisses Γ to conclusion ϕ. By developing a deductive system that distinguishes between explanatory and nonexplanatory arguments we can give introduction rules for operators (...) for factive and nonfactive full ground, as well as for a propositional “identity” connective. Elimination rules are then found by using a proof-theoretic inversion principle. (shrink)

The article addresses the potential impact of functional brain imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron-emission tomography) on surrogate end-of-life decision-making in light of varying state-law definitions of consciousness, some of which define awareness behaviorally and others functionally. The article concludes that, in light of admonitions by neuroscientists that functional brain imaging cannot yet replace behavioral evaluation to determine the existence of consciousness, state legislatures, courts and drafters of written advance healthcare directives should consider treating behavior, not function, as the (...) touchstone for end-of-life decision-making. (shrink)

- L'articolo esamina le qualitÀ della democrazia deliberativa a partire dal riferimento a espressioni storiche di questa: nelle istituzioni ateniesi del quinto-quarto secolo a. C., nella Convenzione Federale statunitense del 1788, negli Stati Generali della Rivoluzione francese, in varie esperienze locali odierne. Stabiliti tre modelli di democrazia e tre criteri per la deliberazione, la questione da affrontare č se la forma deliberativa di democrazia sia un buon sistema politico. La risposta č sě, purché si verifichino tre condizioni: intensitÀ della motivazione (...) nei partecipanti, orientamento al bene pubblico della motivazione stessa, corretta informazione dei partecipanti. Ma si tratta di una conclusione ipotetica, che tiene conto della complessitÀ e molteplicitÀ dei fattori in gioco, e dunque del fatto che nessuna proprietÀ dei processi decisionali collettivi č desiderabile incondizionatamente. (shrink)

In this paper I will put forward a simple case of a dynamical system which can exhibit both the indeterminism linked to escape to infinity and that linked to self-excitation. The case depends neither on the gravitational interaction between particles nor on their mutual collisions, and thus reveals the existence of a new kind of constraint that Newton's laws lay on the predictive power of classical dynamics.

No articulation of `historical thinking' has been as influential as Sam Wineburg's position, according to which historical thinking is, fundamentally, the recognition of the ways in which the past is different than the present. Wineburg argues, further, that achieving that state is `unnatural.' This paper critiques both of these claims, arguing instead that we should replace a generic conception of historical thinking with one that is much more rooted in the specific practice of the discipline. It is surely necessary for (...) students to learn this practice, but it is not unnatural. Instead, learning to think historically is learning to speak the language of the discipline that we call ‘history.’. (shrink)

The nineteenth-century strategist Carl von Clausewitz describes “fog” and “friction” as fundamental features of war. Military leverage of sophisticated information technology in the twenty-first century has improved some tactical operations but has not lifted the fog of war, in part, because the means for reducing uncertainty create new forms of it. Drawing on active duty experience with an American special operations task force in Western Iraq from 2007 to 2008, this article traces the targeting processes used to “find, fix, and (...) finish” alleged insurgents. In this case they did not clarify the political reality of Anbar province but rather reinforced a parochial worldview informed by the Naval Special Warfare community. The unit focused on the performance of “direct action” raids during a period in which “indirect action” engagement with the local population was arguably more appropriate for the strategic circumstances. The concept of “data friction”, therefore, can be understood not simply as a form of resistance within a sociotechnical system but also as a form of traction that enables practitioners to construct representations of the world that amplify their own biases. (shrink)

In this short note I argue that, using the type of configurations put forward in a recent paper by Laraudogoitia in this same journal, new paradoxes of infinity of a completely different nature can be formulated.

I argue that Newtonian-style deduction-from-the-phenomena arguments should only carry conviction when they yield unexpectedly simple conclusions. That in that case they do establish higher rational probabilities for the theories they lead to than for any known or easily constructible rival theories. However I deny that such deductive justifications yield high absolute rational probabilities, and argue that the history of physics suggests that there are always other not-yet-known simpler theories with higher rational probabilities on all the original evidence, and that these (...) later turn out closer to the truth. My analyses rely on the modern Solomonoff-Levin solution to the problem of constructing a mathematically and philosophically acceptable inductive logic. (shrink)

In this short note I argue that, using the type of configurations put forward in a recent paper by Laraudogoitia in this same journal, new paradoxes of infinity of a completely different nature can be formulated.

This paper shows that, in Newtonian mechanics, unstable three-dimensional rigid bodies must exist. Laraudogoitia recently provided examples of one- and two-dimensional homogeneous unstable rigid bodies, conjecturing the instability would persist for three-dimensional bodies in four-dimensional space. My result proves that, if one admits non homogeneous balls or hollow spheres, then the conjecture is true without having to resort to tetra-dimensionality. Furthermore, I show that instability also holds for at least certain simple classes of elastic bodies. Altogether, the laws of classical (...) dynamics actually lead to the existence of unstable material bodies belonging to the three types of entities accepted therein: point particles, rigid bodies and continuous deformable bodies. A whole range of forms of indeterminism which, until now, has not been considered in the literature. I end with a new conjecture on the connection existing between all these forms of instability and the dimensionality of space. (shrink)