Volume 26, Issue 1

For Kant, recognition of national sovereignty is constitutive of international law, and international law is the sine qua non for peace between Peoples. The article demonstrates how and why national sovereignty is inextricably connected to the self-determination of Peoples in Kant’s philosophy of law and in international law. The principle of self-determination in turn is grounded in his idea of a normative dignity of Peoples. In Kant’s theory, “People” and “state” are diachronically conceived. This allows him to define the state’s primary function and foremost duty as securing the individual and collective dignity of its constitutive People against reification through external interference and manipulation, as well as against self-reification, by means of domestic and international law in a peace union of like-minded (i.e. ideally republican) states.

This article focuses on the Danish Prime ministry’s press conferences during the first 3 months of the Covid-19 crisis in 2020 when stakes were high, and reliable information practically non-existent. It analyses various uses of the concept of probability in political communication focusing on aleatory and epistemic concepts of probability, i.e. its ‘dual nature’. The question is whether and how different uses of the concept of probability can be identified in press conferences and how the uncertainty of the situation was communicated to the public. The analysis identifies how a space for decision-making can be extended and limited through the application of various probability concepts.

One of the central problems in the current discussion about the climate crisis is the fact that we (in the broadest sense of the term) do not act according to the knowledge available. That is, the sciences are more or less unanimous in their claim that we need to change our ways of living drastically, and yet we do very little to change. Given that there’s no shortage of scientific evidence, the central issue is not necessarily knowledge, but how we relate to what we already know. But how do such changes in how we relate to what we know come about? How can a radical shift in our way of living come about? Facts don’t seem to do it. In light of this stand-still it is easy to resort to either anger or resignation. One suggestion is that arts, and movies in particular, may help us change our attitudes to what we know. In this article, I show how that what is required is not a mere change in attitude, but that we learn to reconfigure the concepts we live by, and that many films about the climate crisis often may conceal the climate crisis for us and prevent us from engaging imaginatively with the prospect of a radically changed way of living. Not all movies that are, in an objective sense “about” the climate crisis, allows for transformative experience where we learn to conceptualize our world differently.

The use of the open and searchable Wittgenstein’s Nachlass (The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB)) has proved instrumental in the quest for a common thread of Wittgenstein’s view on the connections between meaning, use and consequences, going from the Notebooks to later writings (including the Philosophical Investigations ) and beyond. Here we take this as the basis for a proposal for a formal counterpart of a ‘meaning-as-use’ (dialogical/game-theoretical) semantics for the language of predicate logic. In order to further consolidate this perspective, we shall need to bring in key excerpts from Wittgenstein oeuvre (including the Nachlass ) and from those formal semanticists who advocate a different perspective on the connections between proofs and meaning. With this in mind we consider several passages from Wittgenstein’s published as well as unpublished writings to build a whole picture of a formal counterpart to ‘meaning is use’ based on the idea that explanations of consequences via ‘movements within language’ ought to be taken as a central aspect to Wittgenstein’s shift from ‘interpretation of symbols in a state of affairs’ to ‘use of symbols’ which underpins his ‘meaning is use’ paradigm. As in the Investigations “every interpretation hangs in the air together with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning”, as well as in a remark from his transitional period (1929–30): Perhaps one should say that the expression “interpretation of symbols” is misleading and one should instead say “the use of symbols”. Significantly, we wish the present examination of the searchable Nachlass can make a relevant step towards a formal counterpart to the “meaning is use” dictum, while highlighting an important common thread from Wittgenstein’s very early to very late writings. For this we focus here on the themes of explanation of consequences, movements within language, moving away from states of affairs, meaning versus verification.

This paper critically examines the idea that language use is governed by semantic rules. In the literature, two competing rules have been proposed: the truth rule and the rule of use. The truth rule requires speakers to always use expressions truthfully, while the rule of use requires speakers to use expressions in accordance with meaning. The rule of use has been claimed to be better at making justice to the intuitions on linguistic mistakes, but it is unclear how these rules of use should be formulated. By focusing on a recent suggestion by Indrek Reiland, I assess various candidates for rules of use and show that even these fail to accord with the intuitive notion of linguistic mistakes. I propose that linguistic mistakes should be understood in terms of what I call expressions’ linguistic function. However, this implies that only rules that can capture this notion of linguistic mistakes rely on speakers’ intentions and therefore should be taken as instances of the general relationship between means and ends rather than being intrinsic to meaning.

Grammarians have come to think of their discipline as a descriptive science, not as a set of prescriptive rules. This paper explores the ways in which logic, sometimes called “the grammar of argumentation,” can also be considered a descriptive science. Logic is a natural science that describes a set of observable facts, namely facts about the nature of successful reasoning, but logicians have been remiss in failing to recognize abductive reasoning as an observable mode of successful reasoning. Logic also offers descriptive definitions of words that structure arguments in common speech. But here logicians have made a “prescriptivist error,” offering a definition of the ‘if…then…’ relation that has no basis in common usage. The paper prescribes (to logicians) that they should (a) accept abduction as a third mode of reasoning, and (b) adopt a definition of the consequence relation commensurate with the connexivist school of logic.