HYPERLEXIS AND THE RULE OF LAW

On a popular understanding, the rule of law is valuable because it enables people to plan their lives. However, planning conceptions of the rule of law are undermined by the sheer quantity of legal rules, regulations, and policies characteristic of modern administrative states. Under conditions of hyperlexis, people cannot reasonably be expected to reliably use the law as a guide to conduct. Rather than conclude that the rule of law is inimical to the administrative state, however, I defend an alternative conception of the rule of law. On what I term a contestatory conception, the rule of law requires an adequate opportunity to challenge decisions made by officials in the exercise of their legal powers. The animating idea of a contestatory conception of the rule of the law is that officials should relate to citizens in the space of reasons rather than merely through the exercise of power.

Butler and Postanalytic Philosophy

This article has two aims: (i) to bring Judith Butler and Wilfrid Sellars into conversation; and (ii) to argue that Butler's poststructuralist critique of feminist identity politics has metaphilosophical potential, given her pragmatic parallel with Sellars's critique of conceptual analyses of knowledge. With regard to (i), I argue that Butler's objections to the definitional practice constitutive of certain ways of construing feminism is comparable to Sellars's critique of the analytical project geared toward providing definitions of knowledge. Specifically, I propose that moving away from a definition of woman to what one may call poststructuralist sites of woman parallels moving away from a definition of knowledge to a pragmatic account of knowledge as a recognizable standing in the normative space of reasons. With regard to (ii), I argue that the important parallels between Butler's poststructuralist feminism and Sellars's antirepresentationalist normative pragmatism about knowledge enable one to think of her poststructuralist feminism as mapping out pragmatic cognitive strategies and visions for doing philosophy. This article starts a conversation between two philosophers whom the literature has yet to fully introduce to each other.

The Benefits of Reverse-Engineering

This chapter motivates attempts to reverse-engineer the points of ideas by bringing out the various benefits that conceptual reverse-engineering promises to deliver. After working through seven general benefits of reverse-engineering, it focuses on three benefits that genealogical reverse-engineering is particularly well suited to delivering. First, genealogy can offer us explanation without reduction, combining naturalism and pragmatism into a non-reductive framework that can help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Second, it can affect the space of reasons, subverting or vindicating our ideas by weakening or strengthening our confidence in them. And third, it can facilitate responsible conceptual engineering by alerting us to the multiplicity of functions we need to take into account as we revise our conceptual practices. Finally, the chapter situates pragmatic genealogy in a broader methodological landscape and examines how it can inform and be informed by other methods.

The Normative Significance of Pragmatic Genealogies

This chapter examines how pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons by addressing four objections to this idea: normatively ambitious genealogies commit the genetic fallacy; if not, they founder on failures of continuity in the conditions securing their normative import; if not, this must be because they deal with universal needs, which severely restricts their explanatory scope; and what counts as a need is anyway eagerly contested. In answering these objections, the chapter shows two ways around the genetic fallacy and addresses the problem of Rortyan irony; it offers a need-satisfaction account of functions or pointfulness and discusses the strategies by which genealogies can secure continuity; it shows that the method is not restricted to explaining anthropological universals and that the state of nature can also be used to model local problems; finally, it explores how genealogies help us navigate contestations of certain needs and conceptions of human agents.

From reflex to reflection: Moving from the space of causes to the space of reasons and back

This article proposes to narrow the gap between the space of reasons and the space of causes. By articulating the standard phenomenology of reasons and causes, we investigate the cases in which the clear-cut divide between reasons and causes starts to break down. Thus, substituting the simple picture of the relationship between the space of reasons and the space of causes with an inverted and complex one, in which reasons can have a causal-like phenomenology and causes can have a reason-like phenomenology. This is attained by focusing on “swift reasoned actions” on the one hand, and on “causal noisy brain mechanisms” on the other hand. In the final part of the article, I show how an analogous move, that of narrowing the gap between one’s normative framework and the space of reasons, can be seen as an extension of narrowing the gap between the space of causes and the space of reasons.

A Critical note on Moral emotions and social moral conflicts

I propose in this critical note to reintegrate the place of moral emotions in the space of reasons by establishing a conception of moral conscience as a high degree of consciousness following Hegel’s ideas on consciousness. The space is significantly enlarged by the emotions of empathy, guilt, shame and compassion, these emotions allow us to bring to consciousness reflective control without jettisoning away negative emotions contrary to these, and, then, in such space we increase reflective control relative to our moral lives.

Capitalism as a space of reasons: Analytic, neo-Hegelian Marxism?

I suggest that we can read Marx in the light of recent analytic, neo-Hegelian thought. I summarize the Pittsburgh School philosophers’ claims about the myth of the given, the claim that human experience is conceptual all the way out, and that we live in a space of reasons. I show how Hegel has been read in those terms, and then apply that reading of Hegel to Marx’s argument that capital is akin to what Hegel called Geist, or spirit. We can understand capitalism as a space of reasons that is contradictory: while the space of reasons is supposed to make human freedom possible, our space of reasons makes freedom impossible. Reading Marx in this way is helpful, because it avoids the flaws of analytical Marxism, existentialism and structuralism. However, it raises a large problem of its own: Can the theory of the space of reasons be applied to a society that is not free of alienation? I argue that it can, but only in ways that would not satisfy the analytic neo-Hegelians themselves.

Three Conceptual Problems of Legal Normativity: The Logical Space of Reasons

Chapter 5 continues with the second step of a modest analysis of the concept of a legal system. As a prelude to showing how only the Coercion Thesis can explicate law’s presumed conceptual normativity, this chapter is concerned to explicate the concept of normativity and distinguish among several classes of reasons that might be thought to figure into the problems associated with explicating law’s conceptual normativity. It proceeds to identify the class of reasons that the practices constituting something as a system of law must be presumed equipped to provide. The chapter ends with a description of three conceptual problems of legal normativity that must be solved to vindicate the very rationality of adopting legal systems to regulate behavior.