Aus dem Inhalt: Views from the North: Hans Petter Graver: Law, Justice and the State: Nordic Perspectives u Jacob Dahl Rendtorff: The Danish Welfare State: Philosophical Ideals and Systemic Reality u Sigri!Dur *orgeirsdottir: Feminist Ethics and Feminist Politics u Kuellike Lengi: The Situation of Human Rights in Estonia u Einar Palsson: Pythagoras and Early Icelandic Law u Law, Discourse and Rationality: Mats Flodin: Internal and External Rationality of Legal Systems u Logi Gunnarsson: A Discourse About Discourse u Hjordi!s Hakonardottir: Legal (...) Language: A Tool of Justice u Ghita Holmstrom-Hintikka: On the Use of Expert Witness in Legal Reasoning and Inquiry u Law, State and Nation: Agust H. Ing*orsson: Democracy, Bureaucracy and Marginalization of the State u Aleksander Peczenik: Law-State, Legal Certainty and Legitimacy of Law u Ove K. Pedersen/Sverre Raffnsoe: Reorganizing Society u Juha Raikka: Mill on National Sentiment u Pall Skulason: Concepts of the State and Classes of Value u Problems of Law and Rights: Britt-Mari Blegvad: How to Cope With Uncertainty: Trust and Law u Jon Wetlesen: Animal Rights or Human Duties?. (shrink)

Human rights discourse has been likened to a global lingua franca, and in more ways than one, the analogy seems apt. Human rights discourse is a language that is used by all yet belongs uniquely to no particular place. It crosses not only the borders between nation-states, but also the divide between national law and international law: it appears in national constitutions and international treaties alike. But is it possible to conceive of human rights as a global language (...) or lingua franca not just in a figurative or metaphorical sense, but in a literal or linguistic sense as a legal dialect defined by distinctive patterns of word choice and usage? Does there exist a global language of human rights that transcends not only national borders, but also the divide between domestic and international law? Empirical analysis suggests that the answer is yes, but this global language comes in at least two variants or dialects. New techniques for performing automated content analysis enable us to analyze the bulk of all national constitutions over the last two centuries, together with the world’s leading regional and international human rights instruments, for patterns of linguistic similarity and to evaluate how much language, if any, they share in common. Specifically, we employ a technique known as topic modeling that disassembles texts into recurring verbal patterns. The results highlight the existence of two species or dialects of rights talk—the universalist dialect and the positive-rights dialect—both of which are global in reach and rising in popularity. The universalist dialect is generic in content and draws heavily on the type of language found in international and regional human rights instruments. It appears in particularly large doses in the constitutions of transitional states, developing states, and states that have been heavily exposed to the influence of the international community. The positive-rights dialect, by contrast, is characterized by its substantive emphasis on positive rights of a social or economic variety, and by its prevalence in lengthier constitutions and constitutions from outside the common law world, especially those of the Spanish-speaking world. Both dialects of rights talk are truly transnational, in the sense that they appear simultaneously in national, regional, and international legal instruments and transcend the distinction between domestic and international law. Their existence attests to the blurring of the boundary between constitutional law and international law. (shrink)

Introduction EMPIRICISM DOES NOT stand in very high repute among literary theorists these days. Regarded generally as a discredited philosophical paradigm ...

This study describes metonymic argument alternations, in which a constructional slot can be filled by any of a set of semantic roles that index one another, and provides a diachronic corpus analysis of two such alternations in French. In the Reveal secret frame and other communication frames, the Medium can indexically replace the Speaker and the Topic can indexically replace the Information. A regression analysis shows that while topic for information metonymy is more syntactically and pragmatically restricted, medium for speaker (...) metonymy has seen an increase in usage over time across the frame. This change is related to sociocultural developments and has implications for the study of figurative language and lexical semantic change. While it is well understood that figurative mechanisms such as metonymy affect language change, here it is demonstrated that cultural shifts drive changes in metonymies themselves, with corresponding impacts for linguistic structure. (shrink)

Language & Logic -- Glossary -- Aristotle's syllogisms -- Russell's paradox & Frege's logicism -- profile: Aristotle -- Russell's theory of description -- Frege's puzzle -- Gödel's theorem -- Epimenides' liar paradox -- Eubulides' heap -- Science & Epistemology -- Glossary -- I think therefore I am -- Gettier's counter example -- profile: Karl Popper -- The brain in a vat -- Hume's problem of induction -- Goodman's gruesome riddle -- Popper's conjectures & refutations -- Kuhn's scientific revolutions -- (...) Mind & Metaphysics -- Glossary -- Descartes mind-body problem -- Brentano's intentionality -- Fodor's language of thought -- Parfit's persons -- profile: René Descartes -- Chalmer's zombies -- Zeno's paradoxes -- Kant's left hand -- Theseus' ship -- Laplace's demon, determinism, & free will -- Ryle's ghost in the machine -- Ethics & Political Philosophy -- Glossary -- Aristotle's ethics -- States of nature and the social contract -- Kant's categorical imperative -- profile: Immanuel Kant -- Mill's utilitarianism -- Marx's historical materialism -- The trolley problem -- Religion -- Glossary -- Aquinas' five ways -- Anselm's ontological argument -- profile: Thomas Aquinas -- Epicurus' riddle -- Paley's watchmaker -- Pascal's wager -- Hume against miracles -- Grand Moments -- Glossary -- Socrates' method -- Plato's cave -- Aristotle's four causes -- Lucretius' atomism -- profile: Ludwig Wittgenstein -- Berkeley's idealism -- Kant's synthetic a priori -- Hegel's dialectic -- James' pragmatism -- Moore's common sense -- Wittgenstein's picture theory of language -- Continental Philosophy -- Glossary -- Nietzsche's Superman -- profile: Friedrich Nietzsche -- Derrida's deconstruction -- Heidegger's nothing -- Sartre's bad faith. (shrink)

Fire safety expertise was in great demand following the Grenfell Tower fire in London in June 2017. The government established a review of building regulations and an expert panel to inform its responses to Grenfell, and many other relevant organisations also formed their own expert panels. However, expert knowledge in fire safety is a highly contested domain, with knowledge claims based on differing sources. Fire fighters can claim expertise based on their experience of fighting fires, scientists and science-based engineers can (...) claim expertise from experimentation, and those who create and enact regulations can claim expertise in what can termed ’codespeak’—the language of regulation. Although distanced from fundamental empirical experience of fire, codespeak is powerful because of its relative clarity and certainty, and legal status. Building users also bring their own form of ‘local’ expertise—they have first-hand experience of the practicalities of the solutions wrought by the other experts. Policy-makers thus face many competing forms of expert advice on fire safety, and their ability to judge what is most relevant in any particular case rests on the existence of a sufficient range and depth of in-house government expertise. (shrink)

This paper investigates force shift, a phenomenon in which the canonical discourse conventions, or force, associated with a clause type can be overridden to yield polar questions with the help of additional force-indicating devices. Previous studies attribute force shift to the presence of a complex question force component operating on semantic content. Based on utterance particles and particle clusters in Cantonese, we analyze force shift as resulting from compositional operations on force-bearing expressions. We propose that a simplex force, such as (...) assertion or question, denotes unanchored sentence acts, while a force-shifting particle like Cantonese _ho2_ is an anchoring function anchoring a sentence act to the speaker while querying whether or not the addressee can perform the sentence act. The proposed semantics makes predictions about _ho2_’s interactions with addressee-changing operations and imperatives, as well as about a larger family of force shift phenomena. (shrink)

This authoritative and wide-ranging book, first published in 2003, examines the history of western linguistics over a 2000-year timespan, from its origins in ancient Greece up to the crucial moment of change in the Renaissance that laid the foundations of modern linguistics. Some of today's burning questions about language date back a long way: in 1400 BC Plato was asking how words relate to reality. Other questions go back just a few generations, such as our interest in the mechanisms (...) of language change, or in the social factors that shape the way we speak. Vivien Law explores how ideas about language over the centuries have changed to reflect changing modes of thinking. A survey chapter brings the coverage of the book up to the present day. Classified bibliographies and chapters on research resources and the qualities the historian of linguistics needs to develop, provide the reader with the tools to go further. (shrink)

Inter‐personal morals should be understood and described in the language of duties, not rights. Rights are self‐centred, duties other‐centred. Whereas duties are primarily a moral construct, rights are primarily a legal construct. There is an important distinction between the language appropriate for inter‐personal morals, and the language appropriate for the morals of the State. The first principle of the morals of the State is that the State holds its power as trustee for the people; otherwise we would (...) face arbitrary and capricious rule. In this setting it is natural and proper to speak of rights—the rights of the citizen beneficiaries against their trustee, the State. However, inter‐personal morals and the morality of the State are inter‐dependent. Without a duty‐based personal morality, the laws which the State makes will tend more and more to be oppressive and contemptuous. And the laws of the State must themselves leave room for personal moral commitment, freely entered into, to flourish. (shrink)

The author argues that philosophers' attempts to use philosophy of language to solve problems of jurisprudence have often failed- the most dramatic failure being that of Jeremy Bentham. H.L.A.Hart made some related mistakes in his creative use of philosophy of language, yet his focus on language still yields some very significant insights for jurisprudence: the context principle (that the correct application of linguistic expressions typically depends on context in ways that are important for jurisprudence), the diversity principle (...) (that grounds of correct application of legal language may be diverse), and the importance of vagueness. (shrink)

In recent years, foreign language learning has been proposed as a possible cognitive intervention for older adults. However, the brain network and cognitive functions underlying FLL has remained largely unconfirmed in older adults. In particular, older and younger adults have markedly different cognitive profile—while older adults tend to exhibit decline in most cognitive domains, their semantic memory usually remains intact. As such, older adults may engage the semantic functions to a larger extent than the other cognitive functions traditionally considered (...) the most important. Using anatomical measurements and a cognitive test battery, the present study examined this hypothesis in twenty cognitively normal older adults, who participated in a two-month Italian learning programme. Results showed that the immediate learning success and long-term retention of Italian vocabularies were most consistently predicted by the anatomical measures of the left pars orbitalis and left caudal middle frontal cortex, which are implicated in semantic and episodic memory functions. Convergent evidence was also found based on the pattern of cognitive associations. Our results are consistent with a prominent role of semantic and episodic memory functions in vocabulary learning in older learners. (shrink)

Australia is second only to Israel in being the world’s most culturally diverse nation, based largely on high levels of immigration in the second part of the 20th century. From the 1970s onwards, Australia formally recognized the massive social changes brought about by postwar immigration, and provided legislation to incorporate cultural diversity into everyday lives. One such ‘legislative’ enactment saw the establishment of multicultural broadcasting in Australia, as arguably a world-first, both in its comprehensiveness and diversity. Today, Australia has a (...) public sector corporation, the Special Broadcasting Service, administering five radio services in 68 languages. Also, the Community Radio sector produces multicultural programming in 100 languages through a number of its 330 broadcast and 207 narrowcast stations. This article examines the relationship between radio and its communities. It argues that despite the ‘profile’ of SBS television, radio is much closer to its constituent communities, and therefore plays a greater role in enabling those communities to speak their own histories, beyond the confines of a consensual Anglophile paradigm. (shrink)

Theory of Mind is the ability to predict and understand the mental state of another. While ToM is theorized to play a role in language, we examined whether such a mentalizing ability plays an important role in establishing shared understanding in conversation. Pairs of participants engaged in a Lego model building task in which adirectorinstructed abuilderon how to create duplicate models from a prototype that only the director could see. We manipulated whether the director could see or could not (...) see the builder’s workspace. As predicted, the Mind in the Eyes test predicted accuracy when the workspace was hidden. A high mentalizing ability was an advantage when instructing, resulting in fewer errors, but may be a disadvantage when following instructions. This research indicates that ToM plays a key role in communicating information effectively in conversation. (shrink)

Theory of Mind is the ability to predict and understand the mental state of another. While ToM is theorized to play a role in language, we examined whether such a mentalizing ability plays an important role in establishing shared understanding in conversation. Pairs of participants engaged in a Lego model building task in which a director instructed a builder on how to create duplicate models from a prototype that only the director could see. We manipulated whether the director could (...) see or could not see the builder’s workspace. As predicted, the Mind in the Eyes test predicted accuracy when the workspace was hidden. A high mentalizing ability was an advantage when instructing, resulting in fewer errors, but may be a disadvantage when following instructions. This research indicates that ToM plays a key role in communicating information effectively in conversation. (shrink)

Comparative law is necessary in the modern era in which legal systems absorb ideas and elements from other legal systems and customary legal classifications are altered. Comparative law is closely intertwined with language because the research of different legal systems presupposes the study of legal texts written in different languages. Even if translation exists, a totally crucial issue arises: can the legal essence of the case law of a country be interpreted appropriately in any language but the original? (...) The link between law and language constitutes an absolutely essential relation, since language – through translation – is often the only way of accessing foreign law of foreign countries with different languages. So, the aforementioned relationship as well as its results in case law will be the main topic of this article. First of all, the use of language is of outmost importance to any legal system, as it serves as the means of enforcing written legal rules and contributes to their dissemination, codification and evolution. Both law and language are cultural phenomena and this is why they must be studied taking into account the temporal and social circumstances. Living in the era of multicultural societies and immigration, the need of not just translating but rather transferring the legal essence of the jurisprudence among the different countries with different cultures give prominence to the essential link between comparative law and language systems. Studying case law is regarded as a possibility to redirect judges and lawyers’ attention to the fact that the interpretation of the legal judgement is the cornerstone of a whole legal system of another country. The dynamic relationship of law and language dictates the result of the translation and interpretation of the case law of a specific country in relation to the case law of another country. Thus, comparative law comes out to serve as the guardian of the legal essence in order to transfer the legal point of the judge among different societies with different languages. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a preliminary defence of the use of the concept of dignity in legal and ethical discourse. This will involve the application of three philosophical insights: (1) Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of language-games; (2) his related approach to understanding the meanings of words (sometimes summarised as ‘meaning is use’); and (3) Jeremy Waldron’s layered understanding of property wherein ‘property’ consists in an abstract concept fleshed out in numerous particular conceptions. These three insights will (...) be applied, in the first place, to the concept of ‘dignity’, which is chosen here as a good example of a concept which is both vague and contested in legal and ethical discourse, but which can nevertheless be rendered workable by the application of the aforementioned insights. Later, the analysis will be extended briefly to some other troublesome concepts in order to demonstrate its general application. This paper is concerned primarily with formal, rather than substantive questions about dignity. Matters of content will be touched on only insofar as is necessary to illustrate and illuminate my argument about how we ought to approach (rather than answer) questions about dignity. It should be emphasised that because there is no intention of exploring substantive questions in any depth, the discussion here will not delve into the criticisms of ‘speciesism’ often levelled against the idea of ‘human dignity’. ‘Speciesist’ theories are those that claim that the status, value, or rights of human beings can be regarded as being higher than that of other animals, purely on the basis of their membership of the human species, and without justifying the distinction by pointing to any relevant capacity or characteristic possessed by all and only human beings. For a critical description of speciesism see, e.g., Singer [18] Chapter Three passim; for present purposes, the term ‘dignity’ will be used synonymously with ‘human dignity’, and concerns about speciesism will not be considered. (shrink)

Our world is full of fictional devices that let people feel better about their situation - through deception and self-deception. The legal realist, Felix Cohen, argued that law and legal reasoning is full of similarly dubious labels and bad reasoning, though of a special kind. He argued that judges, lawyers and legal commentators allow linguistic inventions and conventions to distort their thinking. Like the ancient peoples who built idols out of stone and wood and then asked them for assistance and (...) guidance, Cohen argued that within the legal world people tend to create legal concepts and then think that these concepts do or should determine how social disputes must be The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein similarly spoke of the way we fool ourselves, when we use a noun for some matter, and then assume that, because nouns usually name objects, here as well there must be some entity that exists out in the world, whose nature can be discovered. Our grammar misleads us. This article explores some of the ways, particularly in contract law and family law, that we have been led astray by our legal language. Because we only rarely have an Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., or a Felix Cohen to keep us in line, we need to learn to do the important work ourselves. The great danger is the way that inaccurate language can so easily change our substantive views about what is natural or what is right. If transparency is difficult in legal language, much of the fault may lie with lawyers and judges who want to make their conclusions sound more reasonable, less controversial, and more appealing: so we call it "consent" and "waiver" and "meeting of the minds" and "best interests of the child," when it is in fact something quite different. And at least in the common law systems the process of reasoning and law-making is tied strongly to the past. The new case has to fit into the categories and concepts that we created for a prior case - fitting cases that came up hundreds of years before, in a different society, with different technology, facing a different set of problems. So judges often end up stretching the meaning of concepts, or using legal fictions to bridge the old rule with the new equities. We may never entirely escape the tendency of our own language to mislead us, but clarity in thought and analysis is something towards which we should struggle constantly, and with determination. (shrink)

Words have meanings, often more than one. Many words also have evocative power and communicative reach. It is important to look beyond the legal route in making human rights more effective, and to endorse but proceed beyond human rights being seen as motivation only for legislation (the particular connection on which Herbert Hart commented). Within the legal route itself there is the important issue of interpretation of law that can stretch beyond the domain of fresh legislation. In assessing the ‘originalist’ (...) disciplines of legal interpretation, the article discusses the distinction between interpreting the original text in terms of changing linguistic conventions (on which some commentators have focused) and taking note of public reasoning today in the light of the original ‘constitutional motivation’. (shrink)

This essay argues that Pufendorf conceived the principles of natural law against the rationalism and innatism of the 17th century, and that Condillac similarly formulated a conception of the human origin of language, both of them thus securing open and human foundations for the two primal institutions of law and language, and also making all citizens free agents in the ordering of communal living.

Congress's national-security legislation will often require clear and specific congressional authorization before the executive can undertake certain actions. The War Powers Resolution, for example, prohibits any law from authorizing military hostilities unless it "specifically authorizes" them. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required laws to amend FISA or repeal its "exclusive means" provision before they could authorize warrantless electronic surveillance. But efforts to legislate clear-statement regimes in national-security law have failed to induce compliance. The Clinton Administration inferred congressional (...) "authorization" for the 1999 Kosovo War from an appropriations statute that failed to specifically authorize the conflict. And the Bush Administration inferred congressional "authorization" for the NSA surveillance program from ambiguous language in the post-September 11th Authorization to Use Military Force. In both situations, executive-branch lawyers employed expansive theories of implied repeal and constitutional avoidance to evade the codified clear-statement requirements, and Congress and the courts acquiesced to the President's actions. Recent proposals to strengthen the clear-statement requirements in Congress's national-security framework legislation are unlikely to be effective without institutional mechanisms, such as points of order, that can deter future legislators from enacting vague or ambiguous legislation from which the executive might claim implicit congressional "authorization," and that can induce Congress to confront Presidents that act without specific congressional authorization. Simply enacting more narrow or explicit clear-statement requirements, or adding funding restrictions to Congress's framework legislation, fails to counter the aggressive interpretive doctrines that executives of both political parties have used to concoct congressional "authorization" from vague or ambiguous statutory language. (shrink)

This review discusses Harold Berman’s, Law and Language, published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. It locates this short book in relation to Berman’s extensive body of publications in international and comparative law, and asks what contribution the book’s recent, posthumous publication can make to current debates over approaches to forensic linguistics. Particular attention is given to Berman’s conceptualisation of law as a ‘living language’, as well as to his coining of the term ‘communification’ to describe the value (...) of legal-lay dialogue in building a public sense of community and in sustaining the legitimacy of legal systems. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric Jahrgang: 45 Heft: 1 Seiten: 69-86.

Kohl and Nimmerfall, two legal scholars from the Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna, have put forth an edited volume dealing with ‘law and language in practice’. In this article, I present a critical evaluation of the work, taking into consideration its structure and organisation, the range and depth of the work, and the construction of and perspectivation on legal language in use and the legal language user. I do so from the interdisciplinary view of (...) legal linguistics and social semiotics, two areas of critical intellectual inquiry that are doubtlessly underrepresented in this volume. While legal linguists in Austria have anticipated the work as a hopeful bridge-builder across the domains of law and language, Kohl and Nimmerfall display a lack of awareness towards ongoing controversies in legal linguistics on the national and international level that seriously jeopardise the aim of the work. Currently the volume is being used in a course held by the authors entitled “Legal Literacy: Contract drafting, legislation and other areas of law”. Despite the work’s breadth of legal contexts touched upon and its undisputed worth for the community of practice, the work gives a sometimes disconcerting impression of authority in the field. While the authors’ openness to embracing language issues in legal contexts ought to be welcomed, the nearly complete lack of references made to the ever-growing body of research in legal linguistics, not only in Austria but around the globe, is surprising and concerning. (shrink)

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm's, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different (...) sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways. In this methodologically diverse and unusually personal account, Gerry Simpson brings to the surface international law's hidden literary prose and offers a critical and redemptive account of the field. He does so in a series of chapters on international law's bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners. Finally, the book closes with a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this is put forward as a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times. (shrink)

Partial proceedings of the 17th World Congress, International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Bologna, 1995.

This paper focuses on Quebec language legislation which has the effect of prohibiting the use of the use of English on signs. The controversial “Frenchonly” sign law is considered in spelling out an argument for collective rights and assessing some of the obstacles which a collective rights thesis must overcome. No attempt is made in this discussion to resolve the question of the relative weight of the collective and individual rights which come into conflict in this situation. No doubt (...) this latter is itself a difficult task. If the argument of this paper is sound, however, a solution phrased wholly in terms of individual rights and the public good is simpler only because it omits important dimensions of the problem. (shrink)

Matoesian uses the 1991 rape trial of William Kennedy Smith to provide an in-depth analysis of language use and its role in that specific trial as well as the law in general. Examining both defense and prosecutorial linguistic strategies, he shows how language practices shape--and are shaped by--culture and the law.

What is ethics all about? In this book Herbert McCabe suggests that it is about loving, obeying laws, and talking to people.

The history of the idea of tolerance is marked by a rift between its original meaning and its modern one. At first tolerance was understood as the effort made to put up with certain reprehensible acts or lapses with regard to society's values, since rules can never be respected at all times without life becoming unbearable. Conceived originally as a discretion on the part of authority, it progressively acquired the meaning of a “right to differ.” “The idea that a free (...) space must obligatorily be assured to each member of the community,” writes Ghislain Waterlot, “is a relatively new idea that is fundamentally very modern.”. (shrink)

J. L. Austin was one of the more influential British philosophers of his time, due to his rigorous thought, extraordinary personality, and innovative philosophical method. According to John Searle, he was both passionately loved and hated by his contemporaries. Like Socrates, he seemed to destroy all philosophical orthodoxy without presenting an alternative, equally comforting, orthodoxy. -/- Austin is best known for two major contributions to contemporary philosophy: first, his ‘linguistic phenomenology’, a peculiar method of philosophical analysis of the concepts and (...) ways of expression of everyday language; and second, speech act theory, the idea that every use of language carries a performative dimension (in the well-known slogan, “to say something is to do something”). Speech act theory has had consequences and import in research fields as diverse as philosophy of language, ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, linguistics, artificial intelligence and feminist philosophy. -/- This article describes Austin’s linguistic method and his speech act theory, and it describes the original contributions he made to epistemology and philosophy of action. It closes by focusing on two main developments of speech act theory─the dispute between conventionalism and intentionalism, and the debate on free speech, pornography, and censorship. (shrink)

This chapter describes the language of law and the different occurrences of the lexical family of lex as part of a very complex terminology which refers to a more complex range of different types and variants. An important laboratory for a first analysis of the concept of law as essential bond of nature is present in the early writings of the philosopher. Spinoza's ‘treaty of method’ outlines a horizon in which mutual relations and relations of mutual dependency between entities (...) are a guarantee of intelligibility and knowledge. The theoretical process marking the introduction of the geometrical order into the human sphere involves the transformation of the law from a system of universal relationships into personal and collective experience according to a path of interior requalification. The particular conception of Spinoza's law would cross the boundary between philosophy and science, for more than a century. (shrink)

There are few living thinkers who have enjoyed the eminence and reown of Jürgen Hamermas. His work has been highly influential not only in philosopy, but also in the fields of politics, sociology and law. This is the first collection dedicated to exploring the connections between his body of work ahd America's most significant philosophical movement, pragmatism. Habermas and Pragmatism considers the influence of pragmatism on Habermas's thought and the tensions between Habermasian social theory and pragmatism. Essays by distinguished pragmatists, (...) legal and critical theorists, and Habermas cover a range of subjects including the philosophy of language, the nature of rationality, democracy, objectivity, transcendentalism, aesthetics, and law. The collection also addresses the relationship to Habermas of Kant, Peirce, Mead, Dewey, Piaget, Apel, Brandom and Rorty. (shrink)

I discuss the ubiquity of power law distributions in language organisation (and elsewhere), and argue against Miller’s (The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, William Heinemann, London, 2000) argument that large vocabulary size is a consequence of sexual selection. Instead I argue that power law distributions are evidence that languages are best modelled as dynamical systems but raise some issues for models of iterated language learning.