Material inference opens up an exciting prospect for pluralism in reasoning: because the conceptual content of descriptive language is open-ended and variable, legitimate inferences can take unlimited forms. How many forms of legitimate reasoning are there, and how is legitimacy determined? Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom recognise that practices can be legitimate by virtue of their material forms – that is, with respect to their specific vocabularies. Pluralism also finds a foundation in the work of William James and John Dewey. It will be interesting to examine the diverse styles of reasoning found in the history of science, following the models of A. C. Crombie, Nicholas Jardine, and Ian Hacking. A key observation is that historically generated forms provide the standards for reasoning rightly. It is always a social judgement when something is deemed incorrect, even when prompted by external impulses. Legitimate reasoning is constrained by the rules of a community. Intersubjective assessment provides the required and sufficient objectivity. Unfortunately, Brandom is not fully consistent on this point, as he allows for a user-independent means of determining correctness.

The chapter has two main goals. The first is to study what rules are grounded on. Regularities and related philosophical topics can be understood in many ways and at many levels, such as (simple) regularity, rule as law-like, rule-following, and rule-conforming. Sellars’s rule-governed behaviour is central. According to it, acts are done because of a rule, but not because of an awareness of a rule. This enables us to avoid regress in language-learning and getting bogged down in rule-following.The second main goal is to study why rules are binding – that is, on what their normativity is founded. It will be argued that the community must stipulate rules or at least acknowledge them implicitly in practice amid a sea of regularities. This acknowledgement, or normative attitude, forms a standard for correct and incorrect acts. This opens yet another topic to be examined: Can our judgments be right or wrong in some more substantial way that goes beyond communal assent? Is there something like ‘genuine normativity’ in a community-transcending sense? I shall answer this in the negative. The conclusion is that belonging to a community and the choice between them is central to normativity.

This chapter introduces use theories of meaning, originating in the later philosophy of Wittgenstein and further developed by numerous authors over the following decades. According to use theories, the meaning or meaningfulness of an expression consists in or is constituted by its use. The chapter argues that philosophical attention shifted too quickly towards other kinds of meaning theories, overlooking the potential of use-based approaches.A particularly fruitful version, inferentialism, was developed by Wilfrid Sellars. After outlining the basic intuition behind use theories, the chapter focuses on Sellars’s functional theory of meaning. This theory is explained through five central premises: (i) meaning is not a simple (worldly) relation between an expression and an object; (ii) meaning is use; (iii) meaning is a functional role; (iv) abstract notions are distributive singular terms; and (v) the rules governing use are semantically constitutive.

Chapter 2 introduces the concept of Accountable Design and provides a detailed exploration of the terms accountable and design. It draws on extensive scholarship from human–computer interaction (HCI), design research, technology law, and science and technology studies. It advocates for a human-centred framing of accountability and explores the various challenges of achieving more accountable Clever Computing systems. It advances three broad framings of design within Accountable Design, namely, design as a critical lens to help speculate and reflect on futures we want to build; design as an instrumental lens to engineering solutions to problems; and design as creative practice and methods. Normative concerns around design as a regulatory tool are presented, such as the legitimacy of designers’ role alongside the speed and the nature of the enforcement of rules through design. Analysis focuses on how to reconcile legal and design perspectives by exploring how to account for legal values in human-centred technology design processes.

Institutions are considered as ‘rules of the game’ in this chapter, which is informed by two approaches taken to the analysis of institutions in natural resource governance. The first approach centres on viewing co-management itself as an institution. This section draws on common property theory and Ostrom’s design principles for sustainable common property regimes. The section also considers insights from literature on ‘institutional fit’ as a response to scale mismatch to identify lessons for co-management. The second approach is concerned with investigating which institutions shape co-management and how, from formal, bureaucratic institutions of policy and legislation to informal, socially embedded institutions, such as customary systems, kinship ties and gender norms. Critical institutionalism suggests that bureaucratic and socially-embedded institutions may interact through processes referred to ‘institutional bricolage’, with implications for how co-management evolves and performs.

A fundamental contrast in the theory of Natural Phonology is that between “process” and “rule.” Processes are the physiologically/acoustically motivated alterations between intended targets and actual execution of utterances. A subset of these corresponds to what are traditionally called allophonic processes, but casual speech deviations from intention are also processes. Rules are alternations between distinct phonemes that result when historical changes leave phonemically differing variants of morphemes. More recent research shows that the division between processes and rules is not clear-cut. Although vowel harmony appears to be a rule, there are instances of automaticity in some languages’ vowel harmony rules and there children acquire them like processes. Furthermore, the very fine phonetic detail involved in allophonic processes appears to be controllable at will in language play and in code-switching and dialect imitation. Furthermore, such prototypical processes as Final Devoicing appear to have language-specific variations.

David Stampe’s theory of natural phonology (NP) is a psychological approach to phonological theory that is not primarily grounded in intuitions of well-formedness, as are generative approaches, but in performative communicative function. The primary antecedent of this approach was a psychological phonemic theory proposed by Baudouin de Courtenay (late 19th c.). Stampe’s dichotomy between processes and rules corresponds to Baudouin’s dichotomy between physiophonetics (phonology) and psychophonetics (morphonology). Physiophonetic alternations belonged to the same phoneme, but psychophonetic alternations represented different ones. The chapter explores the relationship between Baudouin’s theory of alternations, subsequent schools of Russian phonemic theory based on it, and Stampe’s interpretation of the dichotomy. Trubetzkoy criticized Baudouin’s “psychological equivalent of a speech sound” as viciously circular on the grounds that all speech sounds are psychological in nature. To get around this objection, the NP phoneme can be defined as a mnemonic speech sound. NP is more useful than generative phonology for explaining the nature of phonemic awareness in native speakers.

This chapter introduces and criticises the common underlying features of mainstream approaches to the rule of law. However much they differ from each other, they have two unfortunate features in common. First, they all are responses to a prematurely posed question – what is the rule of law? Second, conventional answers – notwithstanding their many differences from each other – are drawn from within a common, narrowly and legalistically conceived, frame of options. They start by trying to delineate the legal anatomy of the rule of law rather than ask after what sort of problem it is supposed to solve. The chapter criticises this sort of approach wholesale rather than trying to choose retail between one or other examples on offer. The ingredients of a solution depend on what they do to help solve the problem. They cannot be read off from some preconceived list of legal forms and institutions. For, however intelligent and insightful any particular anatomical answers might be, they begin with the wrong question, and so their answers – some extremely intelligent – are, to real if varying extents, beside the point, and they suffer from seven characteristic weaknesses.

In Chapter 3, we return to several questions asked at the end of Chapter 1: what, if any, are the grounds for the introduction of the rules we currently have in our mathematics books? Are they adopted arbitrarily? Why these rules, and not others? How does the introduction of such rules proceed? And so on. However, the chapter looks only at the ‘basic’ rules, such as the simplest addition rules (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4), the rules in the multiplication table (e.g., 3 × 2 = 6), and other simple multiplications, e.g., 21 × 36 = 756. These rules are ‘basic’ insofar as they emerge by ‘hardening’ certain empirical regularities displayed by people’s behavior in arranging and counting manageable physical objects; so, this is in essence a genealogical story. This chapter also serves as preparation for the discussion in the next chapter, where we tackle the possible challenges to these rules (by ‘skeptics’), with the aim of dissolving the problem of mathematical skepticism: what if we have always been wrong about our basic arithmetic?

The first two chapters of this book explained that the law of torts is an evolving body of rules shaped by principles and policy considerations and animated by two different conceptions of justice. It is held in a constant state of tension by individuals and communities’ shifting allegiance between competing interests, goals and values. This means that the law of torts is more than just a set of rules, principles and policies; it is also an ongoing culture of argument that has been developed to manage this inbuilt tension. So, if you want to be successful as a torts student you need to supplement your knowledge of the law by mastering this culture of argument. The first part of this chapter will help you to understand how to use the basic building blocks of the law (rules, principles and policy) to construct effective legal arguments. The rest of the chapter will show you how to structure your legal arguments and apply the law to solve practical legal problems.

There are two readings of how Sellars analyzed ought-statements: a first-order expressivist reading and a metalinguistic reading. In this chapter, I argue that unpublished draft material related to the creation of a key text in Sellars’s practical philosophy, the last chapter of Science and Metaphysics, shows that Sellars at least seriously considered adopting a metalinguistic analysis of “ought.” I also explore the relation between these exegetical questions and the broader problems raised by Sellars’s thought. Which reading of Sellars on “ought” we adopt can affect our outlook on the place of norms in Sellars’s scientific naturalism. I argue that a metalinguistic reading of “ought” permits the view that norms can become perfectly implicit at Sellars’s ideal end of inquiry.

This chapter analyses Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘form of life’ as his final model of context. It argues that the deliberate vagueness of this concept represents Wittgenstein’s attempt to avoid the metaphysical commitments involved in previous formal models while still providing tools for understanding context. This strategic formlessness contrasts with how the concept was later interpreted in anthropology.

Wittgenstein was associated with conceptual analysis and it is widely presumed that that there is a Wittgensteinian account of concepts, yet sustained treatments of the topic in his work are difficult to find. My contribution shows that this irony is more apparent than real. Wittgenstein discussed concepts at some length in material from the early 1930s and manuscripts and lectures from his final period. On that basis I discuss Wittgenstein’s answers to five crucial questions about concepts – concerning their definition, possession, individuation, function and how best to investigate their nature. Wittgenstein and thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him (Frege, Dummett, Peacock) have contributed substantially to our understanding of concepts in two ways: first, methodological reflections on how to approach philosophically contested concepts, the concept of a concept included; secondly, elucidation of the nature and role of concepts through their connections with linguistic meaning, explanation, understanding, abilities and rules.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s key findings, methodology and structure. It also introduces the principal questions the book seeks to address. How have agents, operating at national, international and transnational levels, attempted to institutionalise the norm of corporate accountability for human rights violations linked to transnational corporate activity? What do these initiatives reveal about the nature of transnational legalisation, and how legalisation should be framed or conceptualised in the twenty-first century? Finally, could a revised framework of legalisation help explain when transnational litigation and soft law initiatives are more likely to succeed in the future?

Owners generally get to decide what happens to their property, and this is reflected in legal discussions of property rights and in how children and adults view ownership. Owners’ control over property fits with the idea that ownership serves to reduce conflicts over resources. This chapter first briefly reviews experimental research that fits with this side of ownership. However, the chapter then reviews ways that ownership can take control away from owners. One line of research work shows that children and adults think that nonowners are sometimes allowed to access and even modify property without the owner’s permission. A second line of research shows that whereas people normally have some choice in acquiring ownership or giving it up, people sometimes are viewed as acquiring and retaining ownership even when they do not want to.

Rules are ubiquitous. They figure prominently in all kinds of practical reasoning. Rules are especially important in jurisprudence, occupying a central role in answers to the question of “what is law?” In this chapter, we start by reviewing the evidence showing that both textual and extratextual elements exert influence over rule violation judgments (Section II). Most studies about rules contrast text with an extratextual element identified as the “purpose” or “spirit” of the rule. But what counts as the purpose or the spirit of a rule? Is it the goal intended by the rule maker? Or is purpose necessarily moral? Section III reviews the results of experiments designed to answer these questions. These studies show that the extratextual element that’s relevant for the folk concept of rule is moral in nature. Section IV turns to the different explanations that have been entertained in the literature for the pattern of results described in Sections II and III. Finally, in Section V we discuss some other extratextual elements that have been investigated in the literature. We conclude with a brief discussion of future directions.