The covering law model of historical explanation

It is often argued (as by Hempel and Nagel) that genuine historical explanations — if these are to be had — must exhibit a connection between events to be explained and universal or probabilistic laws (or ‘hypotheses'). This connection may take either a ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ form. The historian may show that a statement of the event to be explained is a logical consequence of statements of reasonably well‐confirmed universal laws and occurrences linked by the laws to the event to be explained. Or the historian may show that a statement of the event to be explained has high inductive probability conferred upon it given statements of reasonably well‐confirmed probabilistic laws and occurrences so linked by the laws to the type of event to be explained that one finds the occurrence of the particular event likely. This essay focuses on ‘strong’ explanations which meet a ‘deducibility’ requirement (for reasons given in the body of the article). It is argued that explanations in history (at least where it is plausible to construe them as ‘non‐rational') may meet a ‘deducibility’ requirement and count as genuine historical explanations although they do not meet a ‘covering law’ requirement (i. e. none of the premises of these explanations state universal or probabilistic hypotheses). It is required, however, that at least one premise in such explanations assert a reasonably well‐confirmed condition (e. g., a co‐variation) which can be taken as a sign or indication of the presence of laws. Rather than appealing to laws, the historian may appeal to the well‐founded possibility of laws.     

Convergence liberalism and the problem of disagreement concerning public justification

The ‘convergence conception’ of political liberalism has become increasingly popular in recent years. Steven Wall has shown that convergence liberals face a serious dilemma in responding to disagreement about whether laws are publicly justified. What I call the ‘conjunctive approach’ to such disagreement threatens anarchism, while the ‘non-conjunctive’ approach appears to render convergence liberalism internally inconsistent. This paper defends the non-conjunctive approach, which holds that the correct view of public justification should be followed even if some citizens do not consider enacted laws to be publicly justified. My argument sheds light on the fundamental structure of convergence liberalism.     

The psycho‐physical laws of intentionality

Intentional mental states have causes and effects. Davidson has shown that this fact alone does not entail the existence of psycho‐physical laws, but his anomalism makes the connection between the content and causation of intentional states utterly mysterious. By defining intentional states in terms of their causes and effects, functionalism promises to explain this connection. If intentional states have their causes and effects in virtue of their contents, then there must be intrinsic states (of the people who have them) which are ‘local causal surrogates’ for the propositions believed, desired, or whatever. We can define these intrinsic states in terms of the laws that govern them, but these laws alone are not sufficient to account for intentional content. To do that we need to invoke laws which link these intrinsic states with their contents. Such a ‘wide’ functional account is sketched; it combines a suggestion of Ramsey's about truth conditions with a ‘feedback’ account of the content of desires.     

The future,and what might have been

Philosophical Studies - We show that five important elements of the ‘nomological package’—laws, counterfactuals, chances, dispositions, and counterfactuals—needn’t be...     

The ‘Enforcer’ in Elite-Level Sport: A Conceptual Critique

The role of the ‘enforcer’ in elite-level sports contests is a familiar one. Simply, the role involves establishing or restoring a ‘moral balance’ to the sporting encounter when it is absent – usually when match officials are thought to be failing to apply the laws/rules of the game. How the enforcer secures this outcome is more morally contentious as it may involve deliberate violations of the laws/rules of the sport. In this paper we consider the role of the enforcer in rugby union. First we interrogate some of the extant sports ethics literature and explore the notion of ‘fairness’ in the well-played game, including the role of the enforcer. Second, we illustrate conceptually how the ethos of elite sport as a moral discourse creates a theoretical platform from which to assess the intervention of an enforcer. Third, we address the role of match officials as members of the practice community from an institutional sense (what the international governing body for rugby union makes explicit) and from an empirical sense (what actually occurs or might occur) in the circumstances that precipitate the intervention of ‘enforcers’. We conclude that the conceptual tension between the laws and the spirit (ethos) of the game is reflected in the choices facing players when playing the game.     

Malebranche and the General Will of God

Central to Nicolas Malebranche’s theodicy is the distinction between general volitions and particular volitions. One of the fundamental claims of his theodicy is that although God created a world with suffering and evil, God does not will these things by particular volitions, but only by general volitions. Commentators disagree about how to interpret Malebranche’s distinction. According to the ‘general content’ interpretation, the difference between general volitions and particular volitions is a difference in content. General volitions have general laws as their content and particular volitions have particular contents. The ‘particular content’ interpretation holds that all of God’s volitions have particular contents. The difference between general and particular volitions is whether the content of the volition is in accordance with the laws that God has established. A proper interpretation of this distinction is essential to understanding Malebranche’s theodicy, as well as his account of occasionalism and God’s causal activity in the world. In this paper, I defend the ‘particular content’ interpretation of the distinction.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Ceteris</Emphasis>-<Emphasis Type="Italic">Paribus</Emphasis> Qualifiers

Antecedent-strengthening, a trivially valid inference of classical logic of the form: P → Q ? (P & R) → Q, has a counterpart in everyday reasoning that often fails. A plausible solution to the problem involves assuming an implicit ceteris paribus (CP) qualifier that can be explicated as an additional conjunct in the antecedent of the premise. The qualifier can be explicated as ‘everything else relevant remains unchanged’ or alternatively as ‘nothing interferes’. The qualifier appears most prominently in the context of the discussion of laws in the sciences, where these laws are often expressed with a CP qualifier. From an analysis of the qualifier’s role in the problem of antecedent-strengthening, we can learn more about CP qualifiers in general and in their application to the laws used in the sciences.     

National piety: Religious equality,freedom of religion and national identity in Finnish political discourse

This paper analyses the legislative discourse regarding a Members' Initiative to enact a law which was discussed in the Finnish parliament in 2006 and which proposed changes to the constitution and several laws, the purpose of which was to balance the privileged position that the Lutheran Church of Finland enjoys. The author uses critical discourse analysis to examine four different discourses emerging from the debate: inequality of religions in the eyes of the law; the ‘completeness’ of the freedom of religion in Finland; the justified hegemony of the ‘folk church’; and the church as a value base in a pluralising world. He argues that the discursive struggle between the different positions is a struggle between ‘minimalist’ and ‘maximalist’ definitions of freedom of religion and that the discussion represents a case of ‘national piety’, a conflation of discourses of religious equality, freedom of religion and national identity that reproduces the status quo.     

Representing approximate ordering and equivalence relations

The central question considered is: given appropriate precisations of the ideas of an empirical system's approximately satisfying laws of measurement with error at most ? (for some ? ≥ 0), and of a real-valued function over its domain providing an approximate representation of its basic operations and relations with error at most δ, can it be shown that satisfaction of the laws with ‘sufficiently small’ error insures numerical representability with arbitrarily small error? Positive answers are given in the cases of ordinal and nominal measurement, together with some indications of the sizes of the errors involved. Problems of extending the theory to more complex types of measurement are discussed, some open problems and conjectures are formulated, and a relation between the ‘approximate representation’ and ‘stochastic choice model’ approaches to measurement with fallible data is established.     

Schaffer on laws of nature

In ‘Quiddistic Knowledge’ (Schaffer in Philos Stud 123:1–32, 2005), Jonathan Schaffer argued influentially against the view that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. In this reply I aim to show how a coherent and well-motivated form of necessitarianism can withstand his critique. Modal necessitarianism—the view that the actual laws are the laws of all possible worlds—can do justice to some intuitive motivations for necessitarianism, and it has the resources to respond to all of Schaffer’s objections. It also has certain advantages over contingentism in the domain of modal epistemology. I conclude that necessitarianism about laws remains a live option.     

On the neurobiological redefinition of psychiatric symptoms: elimination,reduction, or what?

Synthese - Because biologization of psychiatric constructs does not involve derivation of laws, or reduce the number of entities involved, the traditional term of ‘reduction’ should be...     

A critique of Vihvelin's Three-fold Classification

In this essay, I argue for the rejection of Vihvelin's ‘Three-fold Classification’ (3-FC), a nonstandard taxonomy of free-will compatibilism, incompatibilism, and impossibilism. Vihvelin is right that the standard taxonomy of these views is inadequate, and that a new taxonomy is needed to clarify the free-will debate. Significantly, Vihvelin notes that the standard formal definition of ‘incompatibilism’ does not capture the historically popular view that deterministic laws pose a threat to free will. Vihvelin's proposed solution is to redefine ‘incompatibilism.’ However, Vihvelin's formal definition of ‘incompatibilism’ is flawed according to her own arguments. In addition, Vihvelin's characterization of ‘compatibilism’ is (at best) incomplete, and at least two important free-will views are missing from her proposed taxonomy. Given the problems with Vihvelin's arguments for 3-FC, her novel view of the dialectic between the major free-will views lacks support.     

Kant's Pragmatism

This article offers a definition of the term ‘pragmatic’, as it is used in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The definition offered does not make any reference to the affinities between Kant's pragmatism and the philosophies of the American or other pragmatists but draws its definiens entirely from the Kantian conceptual framework. It states that the term ‘pragmatic’ denotes imperatives, laws and beliefs of a specific type: an imperative is pragmatic if and only if it is concerned with the choice of means to individual or universal happiness; a law is pragmatic if and only if our willingness to presuppose it results from our obedience to a pragmatic imperative; and a belief is pragmatic if and only if it relates to the objective validity of pragmatic laws. This article also discusses two rival definitions of the term ‘pragmatic’ (as used by Kant) that have been brought forward by Sidney Axinn and Nicholas Rescher.     

‘THEY KNOW HIM BY HIS VOICE’: NEWMAN ON THE IMAGINATION,CHRISTOLOGY, AND THE THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS

Newman's gift to Catholic theology is the gift of ‘wisdom’: an ability to discern the shape of the whole, not by way of ‘generalized laws or metaphysical conjectures’ but through the ‘concrete’ and ‘living’ soil of the religious imagination. Newman's elemental trust in the religious sensibilities of non‐Christians and the revelatory roots of ‘natural religion’ proceeds from his view of the religious imagination as the experiential, pre‐verbal, and pre‐conceptual realm of contact between God and human persons always and everywhere. Above all Newman recognizes the salvific character of a life of personal holiness. In this respect the life of Christ exemplifies continuity and not radical interruption with countless human beings outside our usual ken who quietly lead lives of sacramental holiness. Bringing Newman into dialogue with contemporary theologians such as Jacques Dupuis, Roger Haight, Terrence Merrigan, and Thomas Merton, the author proposes four lessons for a theology of religions cast ‘under the light of Wisdom’.     

LAWS AND ESSENCES

Those who favour an ontology based on dispositions are thereby able to provide a dispositional essentialist account of the laws of nature. In part 1 of this paper I sketch the dispositional essentialist conception of properties and the concomitant account of laws. In part 2, I characterise various claims about the modal character of properties that fall under the heading ‘quidditism’ and which are consequences of the categoricalist view of properties, which is the alternative to the dispositional essentialist view. I argue that quidditism should be rejected. In part 3, I address a criticism of a strong dispositional essentialist view, viz. that ‘structural’ (i.e. geometrical, numerical, spatial and temporal) properties must be regarded as categorical.     

Three Paths to Legal Legitimacy: African Diaspora Religions and the State

What are the routes by which African diaspora religious groups gain legal legitimacy in modern nation-states of the Americas? African diaspora religions, once prohibited under slave laws, remain predisposed to conflict with the ‘culture of legality’ that is constitutive of the contemporary modern world-system. In negotiating this conflict, different legitimating tactics are called upon in different nation-states, depending on the type of national mythology and level of legal-rational development present. Two legitimating tactics exercised by African diaspora religions are described here: ‘simulation’ in the United States, and ‘sedition’ in Honduras. A third path toward legitimacy, which I call the strategy of ‘seduction’, occurs when states appropriate African diaspora religions as a form of symbolic capital communicating depth and authenticity. Examples of this path are drawn from Brazil and Haiti.     

World Religions Paradigm,legal system and education. The case of the Czech Republic

The article deals with the concept of religion in the laws which regulate access of religious organisations to public education in the Czech Republic. The analysis of the laws reveals that the World Religions Paradigm (WRP) is applied here. Religious organisations representing ‘important world religions’ have a privileged position in accessing public education. Mostly Christianity-based churches have access to public education through the legal notion of ‘special rights’ granted by the state. The article provides a concise review of the key points of criticism of the WRP. The paradigm is criticised as ethnocentric, inherently theological, developed with colonialism, undefinable in practice, highly abstract, essentialist and ahistorical. Its historical development is related to the process of reification as defined by W.C. Smith. The concluding part relates the criticism of the WRP to the concept of religion in the laws regulating the access of religious organisations to public education in the Czech Republic. The application of the WRP leads to restrictions of religious pluralism.     

Looking for laws in all the wrong spaces: Kant on laws,the understanding,and space

Prolegomena §38 is intended to elucidate the claim that the understanding legislates a priori laws to nature (the ‘Legislation Thesis’). Kant cites various laws of geometry as examples and discusses a derivation of the inverse‐square law from such laws. I address 4 key interpretive questions about this cryptic text that have not yet received satisfying answers: (a) How exactly are Kant's examples of laws supposed to elucidate the Legislation Thesis? (b) What is Kant's view of the epistemic status of the inverse‐square law and, relatedly, of the legitimacy of the geometric derivation of that law? (c) Whose account of laws, the understanding, and space is Kant critiquing in the passage? (d) What positive account of the relationship between laws, the understanding, and space is Kant offering in the passage? My answer to (d) depends crucially on my answers to (a)–(c). As I interpret Kant, he holds that a wide range of a priori laws—including geometric laws, the inverse‐square law, and the universal laws discussed in the Analytic of Principles—are ‘grounded’ (a technical term defined in the paper) in categorial syntheses rather than the intrinsic nature of the space given to us in pure intuition.     

Comments on a pseudo-mathematical model in social psychology

This paper critically examines the mathematical model, the ‘confluence model’, proposed by Zajonc, Markus and Markus (1979) as part of their analysis of birth order effects on intellectual differences. Five observations are made. The first concerns lack of precision in the indices contained in the model. The second deals with the coherence of the mathematical formulation. The third identifies presumably unanticipated and remarkable universal laws of mental development which can be derived from the model. The fourth identifies a further ‘universal law’ which arises from inappropriate use of terms to qualify parameters in the formulae. Finally, it is concluded that the ‘confluence model’ lacks the features required of a credible and useful mathematical model.     

A gradual reformation: empirical character and causal powers in Kant

According to Kant each person has an empirical character, which is ultimately grounded in one’s free choice. The popular Causal Laws interpretation of empirical character holds that it consists of the causal laws governing our psychology. I argue that this reading has difficulties explaining moral change, the ‘gradual reformation’ of our empirical character: Causal laws cannot change and hence cannot be gradually reformed. I propose an alternative Causal Powers interpretation of empirical character, where our empirical character consists of our mind’s causal powers. The resulting picture of empirical character allows for moral change and Kantian weakness of will.