This report is part of the United States Institute of Peace’s (USIP) ongoing effort to understand the pluralist legal system of Afghanistan. It examines, compares, and contrasts Islamic law with traditional forms of justice in an attempt to elucidate how such rule of law approaches interact as well as provide a fuller understanding of each system to better guide rule of law practice, policy, an...

Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves is a rhetorically powerful but philosophically unconvincing attempt to show that a deterministic and ontologically reductionist, but epistemologically pluralist, outlook may peacefully coexist with a robust acceptance of human freedom and moral responsibility. The key to understanding the harmony rests in recognizing that freedom is not a metaphysical or physica...

Do people evaluate the quality of explanations differently depending on their goals? In particular, are explanations of different kinds (formal, mechanistic, teleological) judged differently depending on the future judgments the evaluator anticipates making? We report two studies demonstrating that the perceived “goodness” of explanations depends on the evaluator’s current goals, with explanati...

In one of Krylov’s fables, a small dog Moska barks at the elephant who pays no attention whatsoever to Moska. This image comes to my mind when I think of constructive mathematics versus “classical” (that is mainstream) mathematics. In this article, we put a few words into the elephant’s mouth. The idea to write such an article came to me in the summer of 1995 when I came across a fascinating 19...

Received June 6, 1994, and in revised form October 20, 1994. Expanded version of the Retiring Presidential Address presented to the annual meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic at the University of Florida, Gainesville, March 7, 1994. Material from this paper was also presented in lectures to the Fifteenth Annual Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, and at the Univer...