In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant introduces the Formula of Universal Law by saying that it is the one and only categorical imperative. Nevertheless, he proceeds to add a series of other formulas. Their wording differs significantly, and the relations among them are far from clear. In this article, I argue that Kant’s technical-philosophical conception of analogy provides the key to understanding the relations among the formulas. I propose solutions to most—if not all—difficulties commonly diagnosed in the literature, in large part by drawing on Kant’s distinctive republican political theory.

This essay offers a systematic interpretation of Kant’s account of moral cultivation in the Doctrine of Method of the Critique of Practical Reason. While the objective validity of the moral law is secured in the Analytic, the Doctrine of Method addresses the problem of how the law can become subjectively efficacious in agents who already possess freedom as the transcendental condition of their moral agency, and who must therefore not receive it from without, but acquire it as their own. Kant approaches this problem by introducing Räsonieren, a form of arguing that begins from perplexity and aims at cultivating moral sentiment (Gesinnung). I claim that this form of arguing is best understood on the model of reflective judgement as developed in the Critique of Judgement. Drawing on Kant’s account of symbolic presentation in §59, I show that it functions as an ectypal form of analogical reflection already operative in ordinary practical reasoning.

Contemporary classical theists routinely argue that God’s creative act is a kind of divine free willing or free choosing. This article argues that ‘free willing’ or ‘free choosing’ (liberum arbitrium) cannot be a proper divine act on the terms of classical theism. To advance this claim about classical theism at large, we take as our test case Thomas Aquinas’ argument that God freely wills this world, since it is so conceptually comprehensive and representative of much Christian thinking on these matters. We deploy Thomas’ accounts of divine predication, divine attributes, and the nature of free willing to show that when we correctly apply Thomas’ classical theist doctrine of divine perfection to analogically purify the concept of finite free willing – and so render it capable of being properly attributed to God – none of the defining characteristics of free willing remain to be predicated substantially of God; the attribution becomes equivocal. But such equivocations, in Aquinas’ account of divine predication, can still function as religiously useful metaphors, which is what we argue ‘God freely wills creatures’ must be on classical theist terms. Thus, our argument invites classical theists to re-examine the ‘divine-creating-as-free-choosing’ analogy, and to search for other, more adequate ways of analogically conceiving divine creating.

Stress position in English words is well-known to be influenced by phonological, morphological, and (morpho)syntactic factors (esp. verbs vs. nouns). All these influences, however, are far from categorical, and very often stress varies from one word to another in a seemingly unpredictable manner. What is more, recent corpus-based work points to the relevance of opaque, i.e. etymological prefixes. It is, however, unclear why effects of opaque morphology should be productive synchronically. Moreover, there is an increasing body of research indicating that stress assignment works on the basis of lower-level information, i.e. analogy. In this paper we analyze the results of a pseudo-word experiment testing the production of trisyllabic verbs. Structural predictors tested in the analysis comprise syllable weight and prefixation (measuring the transparency of prefixes). To test analogy, we had a computational analogical model predict stress in the pseudo-words based on all verbs in the Cambridge Pronouncing Dictionary. Lexical support measures were then used as predictors alongside weight and prefixation in a mixed-effects logistic regression model. The results show that all three variables are significant predictors of main stress in the experimental data. Lexical support is strongly correlated with actual productions, but AML underpredicts some of participants’ preferences. These are, however, explained by syllable weight and transparency of the prefix in our regression model. We conclude that properties on different levels of representation are relevant for the prediction of stress position in English pseudo-verbs.

When does the law change in a system of precedents? The answer depends on how precedent is to be understood. There are three influential models, which are based on the ideas of rules, reasons, and analogies. We argue that these three theories make different assumptions about how the law changes in reaction to novel cases that do not overrule precedent. According to a version of the rule-based approach, the law changes if and only if a new case in a line of precedents reaches a different outcome; whereas, under the reason-based approach, the law changes with every new legal case, in proportion to the number of new features added to the doctrine by each case, regardless of outcome; and, finally, under the analogy-based approach, the law established by the precedent may change with every new case, in direct or inverse proportion to the differences found between cases, depending on the outcome. Although discussion about the nature of precedents often takes a normative perspective, in this paper we tackle it from an empirical perspective: How do people perceive legal change through precedent? Findings support the rule- and, to a very limited extent, the analogy-based approaches. The reason-based approach found no empirical support. We hypothesise that this reflects a conservative tendency to restrict legal change in precedents and to perceive it as non-incremental, thereby enhancing simplicity. Naturally, theorists may argue that the folk idea of when the law changes in a system of precedent is wrong. We suggest that legal theories should address a possible lack of a minimum descriptive requirement and that there are reasons of transparency and publicity to favour legal concepts that are closer to folk concepts.

Analogies are a fundamental part of our cognition and communication. Humans are also a social species with shared cultural repertoires learnt throughout our lifetimes. As such, we expect analogies to enable the learning of complex, novel information by communication that takes advantage of shared cultural information. Here, we demonstrate the plausibility of this proposal and clarify its scope through computational modelling. We first model the individual-level process of learning via analogy with access to a shared repertoire of cultural information, using NK landscapes to represent high-dimensional solution spaces for complex problems. We then analyse a model of population dynamics to consider the conditions under which analogical communication will evolve and be maintained when costly. Our analyses suggest that even when analogy use is costly in terms of both search time and memory constraints, it can nevertheless be advantageous by allowing learners to obtain high-quality solutions more efficiently and more often than those who do not learn via analogy.

This paper defends a broadly Thomistic understanding of simplicity against a range of contemporary criticisms. Critics of divine simplicity argue that simplicity leads us to identify God with an abstract property and that it renders theological language semantically vacuous because divine simplicity cannot ground a plurality of true intrinsic predicates. I defuse these criticisms by employing some central Fregean distinctions – specifically, the distinctions between object and concept, predication and identification, and sense and reference. While these Fregean distinctions help to dissolve initial logical difficulties, they do not by themselves explain how theological predicates can have determinate content or truth-conditions. I therefore situate the relevant Fregean diagnostics within the Thomistic metaphysical framework of analogy. This framework supplies principled constraints on theological predication without reintroducing composition into God. I conclude by arguing that the Thomistic doctrine of analogy does not eliminate semantic openness but renders theological language sufficiently determinate for meaning and practice, grounding meaningful God-talk in both metaphysics and the formative practices of religious life.

The effect of sound change and analogy upon inflectional paradigms has been traditionally described through Sturtevant’s Paradox, which states that sound change is regular but generates irregularity, whereas analogy is irregular but generates regularity. While past work has explored trends in sound change and analogy qualitatively, quantitative investigation with large data sets remains underexploited. We tackle this by exploring the effects of sound change and analogy from Latin to French in large etymologically paired inflected lexicons containing the complete paradigms of 310 verbs with 11,593 total forms. We employ a novel method combining the automated application of historical sound changes and entropy-based quantitative analysis to examine separately the effects of sound change and analogy. The results confirm the role of some oft-cited predictors of analogy like token frequency and morphological regularity, but offer no support for others like markedness. Results also confirm the complexifying role of sound change, and the simplifying role of analogy, on aspects of morphological complexity like the number of inflection classes and the amount of allomorphy, but suggest that these forces have no comparable effect on more modern measures of complexity like average conditional entropies between inflected forms.

This short report draws attention to an interesting kind of configuration in the lexicon that seems to have escaped theoretical or systematic descriptive attention. These configurations, which we dub SEMPLATES, consist of an abstract structure or template, which is recurrently instantiated in a number of lexical sets, typically of different form classes. A number of examples from different language families are adduced, and generalizations made about the nature of semplates, which are contrasted to other, perhaps similar, phenomena.