This paper develops an account of the meaning and use of various types of legal claims, and uses this account to inform debates about the nature and normativity of law. The account draws on a more general framework for implementing a contextualist semantics and pragmatics, called Discourse Contextualism (Silk 2014b). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the apparent normativity of cl...

David Lewis famously proposed to model conventions as solutions to coordination games, where equilibrium selection is driven by precedence, or the history of play. A characteristic feature of Lewis Conventions is that they are intrinsically nonnormative. Some philosophers have argued that for this reason they miss a crucial aspect of our folk notion of convention. It is doubtful however that Le...

Artifact functions have a decidedly practical character: We are interested in an artifact’s function so that we may use it to achieve our ends. The notion of instrumental functions has recently been introduced in order to emphasize the practical aspects of artifactual functions. In this chapter the normative aspects of instrumental functions are investigated, including both agent norms (concern...

R. Jay Wallace There are two tendencies in our thinking about instrumental rationality that do not seem to cohere very well. On the one hand, the instrumental principle—enjoining us to take the means that are necessary relative to our ends—does not seem to apply indifferently to any end that we might be motivated to pursue. There is, for instance, no genuine requirement to take the means that a...

The prospect of using memory modifying technologies raises interesting and important normative concerns. We first point out that those developing desirable memory modifying technologies should keep in mind certain technical and user-limitation issues. We next discuss certain normative issues that the use of these technologies can raise such as truthfulness, appropriate moral reaction, self-know...

This paper engages with a specific problem concerning the relationship between descriptive and normative claims. Namely, if we understand that descriptive claims frequently contain normative assertions, and vice versa, how then do we interpret the traditionally rigid distinction that is made between the two, as ‘Hume’s law’ or Moore’s ‘naturalistic fallacy’ argument offered. In particular, Krip...