Równania mądrzejsze od swych odkrywców

This article aims to critically analyse the concept of the development of science, as proposed by Wojciech Sady in the work Struktura rewolucji relatywistycznej i kwantowej w fizyce [The Structure of the Relativity and Quantum Revolution in Physics]. The author uses Ludwik Fleck’s concept of thought styles and thought collectives to analyse the problem of how two great scientific revolutions took place in 20th-Century physics in terms of the rise of quantum theory and special relativity. Sady argues that the way of thinking of scientists is determined by the particular thought style in which they were educated, and that great scientific discoveries are not the result of “creative imagination”, but a product of deductive reasoning, in which scholars closely adhere to the formalism of mathematical theory and the results of experiments. Therefore, scientific discovery in physics is made “on paper” rather than “in the mind of a scientist.” In the “battle of equations with the imagination,” equations always win, and scientific discovery is more a result of the work of a scientific community than solitary geniuses, and can only be made at the right time in history, called the “discoverygenic situation.” The concept of the development of science presented in The Structure is directed against the incommensurability thesis and the indeterminacy thesis.

Emotions as indeterminate justifiers

Sentimentalists believe that values are crucially dependent on emotions. Epistemic sentimentalists subscribe to what I call the final-court-of-appeal view: emotional experience is ultimately necessary and can be sufficient for the justification of evaluative beliefs. This paper rejects this view defending a moderate version of rationalism that steers clear of the excesses of both “Stoic” rationalism and epistemic sentimentalism. We should grant that emotions play a significant epistemic role in justifying evaluations. At the same time, evaluative justification is not uniquely or especially dependent on emotions. The anti-sentimentalist argument developed in this paper is based on the indeterminacy thesis. The thesis states that the evaluative properties picked out by our emotional responses are too indeterminate to play a central role in our evaluative practices. I argue that while the indeterminacy thesis undermines the final-court-of-appeal view it supports the claim that emotional responses can provide prima facie justification for evaluative beliefs.

The Return of Forgotten Critique: Some Remarks on the Intellectual Sources of the Polish Populist Revolution

The Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS), which has been ruling in Poland since 2015, has developed a specific narrative about the law and judiciary, which constitutes the ideological background of its stance in the conflict concerning the rule of law in the country. The main tenets of the legal ideology of Law and Justice include the views that judicial decisions are not determined by legal texts (the indeterminacy thesis), and that judges are part of an elite who are detached from society at large and are attempting to impose the liberal world-view upon a conservative society. The aim of the paper is to deconstruct those ideological constructs in a search for their possible sources in certain critical currents in the legal theory of the Polish People’s Republic, represented by Stanisław Ehrlich, Leszek Nowak and Jarosław Ładosz. The paper notes interesting parallels between the legal ideas developed by those three legal theorists and the current narrative put forward by Law and Justice. Whilst stopping short of claiming a direct and conscious inspiration, the paper nonetheless hypothesises possible avenues of influence, including the academic mentorship of Ehrlich over Jarosław Kaczyński in the early 1970s and Nowak’s involvement in the ‘Solidarity’ movement in the 1980s following his anti-Marxist intellectual and political turn. The paper concludes that legal critique in Poland, after a period of being repressed in the 1990s, is now returning; however, whilst its first appearance (in the socialist period) was a ‘tragedy’ (due to its inability to subject socialist law to any form of critique), its current return is a ‘farce’, since critical tools are used not for their original purpose (emancipation), but in order to further a populist-conservative project.

Privacy Law’s Indeterminacy

Fools rush in. ALEXANDER POPE, AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM (London, 1711). The full quotation is, “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.” Id. at 66. She who hesitates is lost. Adaptation of the line, “The woman that deliberates is lost.” JOSEPH ADDISON, CATO: A TRAGEDY, AND SELECTED ESSAYS 30 (2004). See also OLIVER WENDALL HOLMES, SR., THE AUTOCRAT AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE 29 (1858) (“The woman who ‘calculates’ is lost.”). American legal realism numbers among the most important theoretical contributions of legal academia to date. Given the movement’s influence, as well as the common centrality of certain key figures, it is surprising that privacy scholarship in the United States has paid next to no attention to the movement. This inattention is unfortunate for several reasons, including that privacy law furnishes rich examples of the indeterminacy thesis — a key concept of American legal realism — and because the interdisciplinary efforts of privacy scholars to explore extra-legal influences on privacy law arguably further the plot of legal realism itself.

Ronald Dworkin and Duncan Kennedy: Two Views of Interpretation

Ronald Dworkin and Duncan Kennedy represent arguably two opposing poles in legal theory. This paper offers a novel frame for reading their respective legal theories which reconceptualizes the traditional way in which they were opposed, and new ways to compare them, to understand their commonalities and their differences.While Dworkin is taken to be a champion of a theory of rights, he is also associated with a certain theory of interpretation which holds that even in hard cases judges have limited discretion and a right answer to every legal question we might reasonably encounter. Kennedy, in contrast, seems to disagree with Dworkin in every conceivable respect such as the nature of law and legal reasoning, the role of right, the relation of law to its outsides (politics/ideology), thus questioning the objectivity and neutrality of legal reasoning, and he seems to be advocating what could be termed as a “radical indeterminacy” thesis.The paper attempts reading Dworkin and Kennedy alongside each other, rather than in opposition, and so it deploys two interrelated strategies to establish such frame. One is concerned softening what appear to be rigid opposition through scrutinizing their writings, whereas the other takes stock of the common themes, presuppositions, images of law, and sensibilities that both share either explicitly or implicitly. This double strategy reveals the arguments that are attributed to them and which they themselves deny they are making. To that end, the paper unveils an unacknowledged shift toward phenomenology in legal theory that took place in the last few decades.

Multiple-Offense Sentencing

This chapter offers some additional thoughts on the subject of multiple-offense sentencing. It discusses John Taurek’s indeterminacy thesis and its plausibility with regards to multiple-count cases. It then considers two desert-based limiting principles applicable to multiple-offense situations: normative breaks and overall proportionality. It also examines the possibility of utilizing a heuristic model, an example of which is Martin Borgeke’s scheme for scaling multiple offenses. Finally, it highlights the limitations of desert theory and argues that it may not be able to assist us all the way in developing a sentencing doctrine for multiple offenders.

Semantic Facts and a Priori Knowledge

This paper is a response to a paper by Marcus Giaquinto in which he argues that lexical meaning is moderately indeterminate and that this poses a problem for the linguistic view of a priori knowledge. I argue that accepting the moderate indeterminacy thesis as he presents it is perfectly compatible with both the linguistic view in general and the specific suggestion that some a priori knowledge can be explained by appealing to synonymy. I also argue that, in fact, Giaquinto's considerations speak in favour of the linguistic view rather than against it. The general lesson is that, contrary to what might be suspected, the linguistic view does not presuppose an implausibly simple and tidy conception of lexical meaning.

What is Left of the Law and Society Paradigm after Critique? Revisiting Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories”

For more than twenty-five years, Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” has been savored by legal historians as one of the most incisive explanations available of what legal history can and should be. Gordon's essay, however, is of significance to the course of sociolegal studies in general. This commentary offers an appreciation, and a critique, of “Critical Legal Histories.” It explores Gordon's articulation of the central themes of critical legal studies, in particular his corrosion of functionalism and embrace of the indeterminacy thesis, and assesses the consequences for sociolegal and legal-historical analysis of the resultant stress on the contingency and complexity of social life.

Indeterminacy, Incompleteness, Indecision, and Other Semantic Phenomena

This paper explores the relationships between Davidson's indeterminacy of interpretation thesis and two semantic properties of sentences that have come to be recognized recently, namely semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision. More specifically, I will examine what the indeterminacy thesis entails for sentences of the form ‘By sentence S (or word w), agent A means that m’ and ‘Agent A believes that p.’ My primary goal is to shed light on the indeterminacy thesis and its consequences. I will distinguish two kinds of indeterminacy that have very different sources and very different consequences. But this does not purport to be an exhaustive study: there may well be other forms of indeterminacy that this paper does not address.I will first explain the phenomena of semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision, and then explore their relationships with the indeterminacy thesis.