Recht als Gegenstand rhetorischer Grundlagenforschung

According to the self-image of lawyers, jurisprudence is a science: the premises in legal conclusions are truth-apt, as are the conclusions or judgements that follow from them, the cognition of true law is consequently regarded as their task. Against this background, a program that understands and analyzes law as the product of a rhetorical practice is confronted with fierce resistance. According to the research of analytical legal rhetoric, on the other hand, the evidence for a rhetorical imprint on law is overwhelming: starting with the logical status of legal inferences, to the peculiarities of judicial procedure, to the motivational situation of those involved in it, everywhere it becomes apparent that the image of strict truth-orientation inadequately describes the genesis of law. Following Aristotle, who assigned law to the field of phrónēsis and not to epistēmē, contemporary legal rhetoric research aims to draw a realistic picture of the genesis of law. Subdivided into the triad of logos, ethos, and pathos, it attempts to fully grasp the interrelationships involved. It becomes apparent that the rational or argumentative dimension is far from dominating in legal justifications. It is precisely at the neuralgic point, i.e., where arguments are opposed to each other, that the rhetor typically uses a rhetorical figure that links all levels of the triad: the restrictio.

The Materiality of the Ancient Dead – Post-burial Practices and Ontologies of Death in Southern Sweden AD 800–1200

This text discusses reuse and modifications of older graves in southern Sweden during the Late Iron Age and early medieval period (c. 9th to 12th centu- ries AD). Post-burial practices in the Late Iron Age have in general been interpreted as means to nego- tiate status, identity and rights to land, while in the later part of the period they are comprehended as expressions of religious insecurity and syncretism. In this text, the continuity of post-burial practices during the whole period is stressed and instead of general top-down interpretative models, the onto- logical status and material aspects of death, dead bodies and their graves is emphasized. It is argued that the post-burial actions generally constituted ways of relating to a specific type of materiality, the bones of the ancient dead, which transgress binary categorizations such as living–dead, past–present, heathen–Christian, and human–nonhuman. The argument builds on five recently excavated sites in southern Sweden: Bogla, Broby Bro, Lilla Ullevi, Valsta and Vittene.

Determiners are "conservative" because their meanings are not relations: evidence from verification

Quantificational determiners have meanings that are "conservative" in the following sense: in sentences, repeating a determiner's internal argument within its external argument is logically insignificant. Using a verification task to probe which sets (or properties) of entities are represented when participants evaluate sentences, we test the predictions of three potential explanations for the cross-linguistic yet substantive conservativity constraint. According to "lexical restriction" views, words like every express relations that are exhibited by pairs of sets, but only some of these relations can be expressed with determiners. An "interface filtering" view retains the relational conception of determiner meanings, while replacing appeal to lexical filters (on relations of the relevant type) with special rules for interpreting the combination of a quantificational expression (Det NP) with its syntactic context and a ban on meanings that lead to triviality. The contrasting idea of "ordered predication" is that determiners don't express genuine relations. Instead, the second argument provides the scope of a monadic quantifier, while the first argument selects the domain for that quantifier: the sequences with respect to which it is evaluated. On this view, a determiner's two arguments each have a different logical status, suggesting that they might have a different psychological status as well. We find evidence that this is the case: When evaluating sentences like every big circle is blue, participants mentally group the things specified by the determiner's first argument (e.g., the big circles) but not the things specified by the second argument (e.g., the blue things) or the intersection of both (e.g., the big blue circles). These results suggest that the phenomenon of conservativity is due to ordered predication.

Pleasure As a Subject of Logic. To the Interpretation of Philebus. Part I

The task of the paper is to determine what is the philosophical meaning of Plato’s Philebus. To define the meaning is to show which way of understanding Phile­bus is the most fruitful, most fully grasping and revealing what forms the sub­stantive core of Plato’s text. It’s no secret that the meaning of Philebus is not at all self-evident. From our point of view, the main subject of the dialogue lies not in the plane of ontology, but in ethics, and what is taken for ontological aspects in Philebus is much more related to the logical and methodological conditions for solving the main ethical problem. Therefore, in this article an attempt was made to show that the key themes of Philebus(the problem of the one-many, the relationship of the four kinds of beings, the theory of false pleasures) are inter­nally related. The question of the relationship between the one and the many is raised in connection with the clarification of the question of the logical status of pleasure. Division into four kinds (limit, unlimited, mixture, reason) is the ful­fillment of the methodological requirement for the necessity of division. The ana­lysis of pleasures following this methodological introduction examines pleasure in an entirely new light, in the light of truth/falsity.

Pleasure As a Subject of Logic. To the Interpretation of Philebus. Part II

The task of the paper is to determine what is the philosophical meaning of Plato’s Philebus. To define the meaning is to show which way of understanding Philebus is the most fruitful, most fully grasping and revealing what forms the substantive core of Plato's text. It’s no secret that the meaning of Philebus is not at all self-evident. From our point of view, the main subject of the dialogue lies not in the plane of ontology, but in ethics, and what is taken for ontological as­pects in Philebus is much more related to the logical and methodological condi­tions for solving the main ethical problem. Therefore, in this article an attempt was made to show that the key themes of Philebus(the problem of the one-many, the relationship of the four kinds of beings, the theory of false pleasures) are internally related. The question of the relationship between the one and the many is raised in connection with the clarification of the question of the logical status of pleasure. Division into four kinds (limit, unlimited, mixture, reason) is the fulfillment of the methodological requirement for the necessity of division. The analysis of pleasures following this methodological introduction examines pleasure in an entirely new light, in the light of truth/falsity.

Similar Ways of Creating Thirdness

It is well-known that Kant and Frege offer seemingly exclusive answers to the (epistemo)logical status of equations. Expressions like “7 + 5 = 12” are synthetic for Kant but analytic for Frege. Nevertheless, Kant and Frege have a shared interest: Demonstrating the possibility of grasping a general real by science. Kant’s question is “How is metaphysics as science possible?” Frege answers the question “How is logic as science possible?” Both thinkers are convinced that a precondition for answering their questions consists in the creation of a third concept. But how? Traditionally given mutually exclusive distinctions seem to let no room for such a different third concept. The revolutionary idea is to create basic concepts as molecules(patterns, Gestalten)with a characteristic inner structure opposed to atoms without any inner structure. Such molecules ”“ Kant’s “synthetic judgments a priori” and Frege’s “thoughts” ”“ can be analyzed as2-dimensionally structured intermediate cases.

Constructive truth and falsity in Peano arithmetic

Artemov (2019, The provability of consistency) offered the notion of constructive truth and falsity of arithmetical sentences in the spirit of Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov semantics and its formalization, the logic of proofs. In this paper, we provide a complete description of constructive truth and falsity for Friedman’s constant fragment of Peano arithmetic. For this purpose, we generalize the constructive falsity to $n$-constructive falsity in Peano arithmetic where $n$ is any positive natural number. Based on this generalization, we also analyse the logical status of well-known Gödelean sentences: consistency assertions for extensions of PA, the local reflection principles, the ‘constructive’ liar sentences and Rosser sentences. Finally, we discuss ‘extremely’ independent sentences in the sense that they are classically true but neither constructively true nor $n$-constructively false for any $n$.

Public Truths and Their Legal Protection

In this paper I deal with two key concepts of a modern political theory, i.e. truth and public interest, and examine relationships between them. This subject seems particularly important in the context of the observed crisis of the liberal democracy and the spread of misinformation and fake news. I argue that there is a need to create a public system of protection designed to defend the logical status of those statements which have a value for the society. By using the notion of public interest as a tool for analysis, I demonstrate how such a system might be structured. I suggest employing existing public institutions to construct a system of public protection of the truth, yet supplemented by a coordinating body based on the ombudsman model.

Contractual Constructions

Social contract theory can be understood as a form of constructivism. Constructivism is the view that the content of morality can be defined by a procedure, the results of which define principles of actions. Constructivism can be understood as directed both to the normative question of what principles are justifiable and to the meta-ethical question as to the logical status of such principles. In respect of the latter, constructivism holds to a procedure-dependent conception of practical reason rather than a truth-directed view. In the case of social contract theory, the procedure is made up of three elements: an original position; the reasoning of the contracting parties; and the contents of the agreement that those contracting parties conclude with one another. Some contract theorists can be thought of as aspiring to a form of ethical reductionism, involving the defining of moral notions in non-moral terms by means of the constructed procedure, but this is not true of all. In this connection, there is a dispute as to whether rationality is to be defined in terms of self-interest. Constructivism is offered as an alternative to intuitionism, in which it is assumed that principles are in some sense self-evident.

Why the Axiom of Choice Sometimes Fails

The early controversies surrounding the axiom of choice are well known, as are the many results that followed concerning its (in)dependence from, and equivalence to, other mathematical propositions. This paper focuses not on the logical status of the axiom but rather on showing why it fails in certain categories.