Current Legal Issues, like its sister volume Current Legal Problems, is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year, leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloqium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice.Law (...) and Psychology, the latest volume in the Current Legal Issues series, contains a broad range of essays by scholars interested in the interactions between law and psychology. The volume includes studies of jury trials in terrorism cases, psychological evidence in family law cases, child witness testimony and the role of psychology in punishment theory. (shrink)

Current Legal Issues, like its sister volume Current Legal Problems, is based upon an annual colloquium held at University College London. Each year, leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloqium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice.Law (...) and Psychology, the latest volume in the Current Legal Issues series, contains a broad range of essays by scholars interested in the interactions between law and psychology. The volume includes studies of jury trials in terrorism cases, psychological evidence in family law cases, child witness testimony and the role of psychology in punishment theory. (shrink)

I argue that Fodor's analysis of ceteris paribus laws fails to underwrite his appeal to such laws in his sufficient conditions for representation. It also renders his appeal to ceteris paribus laws impotent against the major problem for his theory of representation. Finally, Fodor's analysis fails to provide useful solutions to the traditional problems associated with a thoroughgoing understanding of ceteris paribus clauses. The analysis, therefore, fails to bolster Fodor's position that special science laws are of necessity ceteris paribus laws (...) and that one must recognize them as scientifically legitimate. (shrink)

In this essay I enter into a recently published debate between Stephen Schiffer and Jerry Fodor concerning whether adequate sense can be made of the ceteris paribus conditions in special science laws, much of their focus being on the case of putative psychological laws. Schiffer argues that adequate sense cannot be made of ceteris paribus clauses, while Fodor attempts to overcome Schiffer's arguments, in defense of special science laws. More recently, Peter Mott has attempted to show that Fodor's response to (...) Schiffer fails, and furthermore that further study shows that the logical framework in which Schiffer and Fodor address their issue is susceptible to inconsistency.In this essay I argue that adequate sense can be made of ceteris paribus conditions. Against Mott, I argue that recent work in the model theory of non-monotonic logic indicates how his problem involving logical inconsistencies can be overcome. Against Schiffer, I argue that the claims that he makes against ceteris paribus clauses would lead to a fatal skepticism concerning indefinitely many of the claims we make about the world (and indeed that his claims would be destructive of the view of the special sciences that Schiffer himself presents in his paper), and that the semantical considerations from non-monotonic logic that I present provide a suitable framework for dealing with his complaints. Thus I come out on the whole on Fodor's side of this debate, although for my own reasons, as I argue against much of Fodor's own argumentation. (shrink)

In the present essay, I consider the relevance of evolutionary psychology (EP) for legal positivism, addressing the two main traditions in the legal positivist family: (1) the tradition I identify with the works of Hart and Kelsen and characterize as “normativist,” as it tries to describe law as a purely or, at least, as an essentially normative phenomenon, while remaining true to the ideal of scientific objectivity and value-neutrality; (2) the tradition I broadly refer to as “legal realism,” which (...) equates law with adjudication and “legal science” with the task of explaining judicial behaviour. (shrink)

Mind and Rights combines historical, philosophical, and legal perspectives with research from psychology and the cognitive sciences to probe the justification of human rights in ethics, politics and law. Chapters critically examine the growth of the human rights culture, its roots in history and current human rights theories. They engage with the so-called cognitive revolution and investigate the relationship between human cognition and human rights to determine how insights gained from modern theories of the mind can deepen our understanding (...) of the foundations of human rights. Mind and Rights argues that the pursuit of the human rights idea, with its achievements and tragic failures, is key to understand what kind of beings humans are. Amidst ongoing debate on the universality and legitimacy of human rights, this book provides a uniquely comprehensive analysis of great practical and political importance for a culture of legal justice undergirded by rights. Matthias Mahlmann is University Professor, Chair of Philosophy and Theory of Law, Legal Sociology and International Public Law at the University of Zurich. (shrink)

The nature and status of psychological laws are a long-standing controversy. I will argue that part of the controversy stems from the distinctive nature of an important subset of those laws, which I’ll call “supple laws.” An emergent-model strategy taken by the new interdisciplinary field of artificial life provides a strikingly successful understanding of analogously supple laws in biology. So, after reviewing the failures of the two evident strategies for understanding supple psychological laws, I’ll turn for inspiration to emergent-models explanations (...) of supple laws in biology. I’ll conclude by inferring what an emergent model of supple laws in psychology should be like. (shrink)

The Copernican revolution with which Kant transformed the question of whether knowledge is possible into the query as to how knowledge is possible, constitutes one stage in the development of epistemology from a speculative to an observational science — i.e., one that proceeds from the investigation of concrete, existent objects rather than from a small number of presupposed concepts. This path, leading from speculation to examination of the concrete objects of research — for epistemology, to the investigation of the various (...) individual sciences — is long and arduous, and even now it has been traversed only a small part of the way. Although epistemological research has for a long time had some relation to mathematics and physics, and a more concrete exploration of biology and the humanities has recently been launched as well, we undoubtedly still stand at the very beginning of this enterprise. One major task for the epistemological inquiry into a specific discipline is bound up with tracing the course of development of that science — in particular, the radical shifts and readjustments in a science that promise to furnish the epistemologist with valuable information. Seen from this angle, psychology also currently deserves the special attention of epistemology. (shrink)

This book advances the prototype theory of categorisation within a legal context. The work adopts a multidisciplinary approach and draws on insights from cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics and analytic philosophy to discuss semantic problems present in law. Designed as a bridge between cognitive linguistics and legal theory, it argues that categorisation is a crucial cognitive operation for the application of law and that theories of categorisation are relevant to legal theory. It makes the case that the prototype approach is (...) better suited than more formal approaches usually utilised in jurisprudence to explaining many familiar linguistic problems found in law, such as vagueness, polysemy, the flexibility of meaning, the generality of language, context-dependence of meaning, linguistic indeterminacy, and so on. The book focuses on problems of semantic analysis in law, both in concrete cases, that is, particular cases before courts, and, at the theoretical level, on methods of statutory interpretation. It will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of Law and Language, Legal Theory, Legal Philosophy and Legal Linguistics. (shrink)

1. Introduction: Naturalism and Psychological Explanations To a large extent, contemporary philosophical debate takes place within a framework of naturalistic assumptions. From the perspective of the history of philosophy, naturalism is the legacy of positivism without its empiricist epistemology and empiricist conception of meaning and cognitive significance. Systematically, it is best to characterize naturalism as the philosophical articulation of the underlying presuppositions of a reductive scientific research program that was rather successful in the last few centuries and, equally important, promises (...) to be so in the future particularly in the biological sciences and the neurosciences. It seems as if the secrets of human life and behavior and the mysteries of the mind will be cracked on the molecular level of the genes or the brain, or at least so we are told. Viewed in this manner it is understandable why philosophical naturalism tends to be committed to monism, both as a metaphysical or ontological claim and as a methodological position in the philosophy of social science. Naturalists are inclined to adopt a physicalist ontology that rejects free floating Cartesian substances and they view higher order macroscopic facts and properties as being dependent or supervenient on basic micro-physical facts. Naturalists, furthermore, expect that any scientific explanation of higher order properties has to provide an account of why and how these lower order facts give rise to higher order ones. These ontological and epistemic commitments also underpin a position of methodological monism in regard to the social sciences and the explanation of human agency. If the above ontological picture is correct then there is no reason to expect that the structure of the sciences dealing with higher order properties on the social level should fundamentally differ in their methodology from the natural sciences. In both domains of investigation, scientists will develop and make explanatory use of comprehensive and empirically well supported theories with adequate predictive powers that describe.... (shrink)

" In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the ...

In "Behavioral Law and Economics: The Assault on Consent, Will, and Dignity," Mark D. White uses the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant to examine the intersection of economics, psychology, and law known as "behavioral law and economics." Scholars in this relatively new field claim that, because of various cognitive biases and failures, people often make choices that are not in their own interests. The policy implications of this are that public and private organizations, such as the state and employers, (...) can and should design the presentation of options and default choices in order to "steer" people to the decision they would make, were they able to make choices in the absence of their cognitive biases and failures. Such policies are promoted under the name "libertarian paternalism," because choice is not blocked or co-opted, but simply "nudged." White argues that such manipulation of choice is impossible to conduct in people's true interests, and any other goal pursed by policymakers substitutes their own ends, however benevolent they may be, for people's true ends. Normatively, such manipulation should not be conducted because it fails to respect the dignity and autonomy of persons, what some hold to be the central idea in Kant's ethical system, and which serves to protect the individual from coercion, however subtle, from other persons or the state. (shrink)

This anthology highlights the theoretical foundations as well as the various applications of Behavioural Law and Economics in European legal culture. By the same token, it fosters the dialogue between European and American Law and Economics scholars. The traditional neo-classical microeconomic theory explains human behaviour by using Rational Choice. According to this model, people tend to maximize the difference between expected utility and cost ("expected utility theory"). This theory includes three assumptions: (1) unbounded rationality, (2) unbounded self-interest, and (3) unbounded (...) willpower. Behavioural Economics questions these assumptions and endeavours to render economic analysis more realistic by underpinning it with psychological insights. In recent years, the influence of Behavioural Economics on the Economic Analysis of Law has gained momentum. Behavioural Law and Economics generates a better theoretical understanding of legal phenomena and offers a multitude of applications in legislation and legal adjudication. This volume is testament to the growing and thriving Law and Economics movement in Europe. The European Law and Economics community has steadily grown and the yearly Law and Economics Conference at the law faculty of the University of Lucerne has successfully become a guiding star in the vast sky of Law and Economics. (shrink)

This study aims to achieve the goal of cultivating and reserving emerging professional talents in social security law, improve the curriculum and mechanism of entrepreneurship education, and improve students’ entrepreneurial willingness and entrepreneurial ability. Deep learning technology is used to study the psychological effects of entrepreneurship education for college students majoring in social security law. Firstly, the concept of entrepreneurial psychology is elaborated and summarized. A related model is designed using the theory of proactive personality and planned behavior through (...) questionnaire survey and regression analysis to explore the relationship between students’ entrepreneurial psychology and entrepreneurial intention. Secondly, an entrepreneurship education method based on deep learning is proposed, and a teaching model of multi-dimensional collaborative entrepreneurship education practice is constructed. On this basis, the deep learning algorithm combines the characteristics of the personalized recommendation algorithm to construct an efficient Problem-Based Learning learning resource recommendation algorithm. Finally, the proposed method is tested. The results show that the Significant value of students who have participated in PBL deep learning courses is less than 0.05, indicating that PBL significantly improves students’ learning ability and the ability to deal with entrepreneurial environments. The results verify the impact of entrepreneurial learning on entrepreneurial intentions. The research on PBL online learning recommendation system shows that the proposed recommendation algorithm is superior to the traditional recommendation algorithm in both roots mean square error value and mean absolute error value on both datasets. The proposed method provides a new idea of reform and innovation to cultivate social security law professionals and the cultivation of the reserve model. (shrink)

Social interaction and the constitution of mediated and nested space in the court of appeal -- Conclusion -- Concluding remarks: On becoming juridical -- Ways of spacing law and politics -- Becoming juridical -- Towards hybrid juridical spaces -- References -- Index.

This paper argues that Twin Earth twins belong to the same psychological natural kind, but that the reason for this is not that the causal powers of mental states supervene on local neural structure. Fodor’s argument for this latter thesis is criticized and found to rest on a confusion between it and the claim that Putnamian and Burgean type relational psychological properties do not affect the causal powers of the mental states that have them. While it is true that Putnamian (...) and Burgean type relational psychological properties do not affect causal powers, it is false that no relational psychological properties do. Examples of relational psychological properties that do affect causal powers are given and psychological laws are sketched that subsume twins in virtue of them instantiating these relational properties rather than them sharing the narrow contents of their thoughts. (shrink)

University of Colorado, Boulder If there are laws of psychology, they would seem to hold only ceteris paribus (c.p., hereafter), i.e., other things being equal. If a person wants that q and believes that doing a is the most efficient way to make it the case that q, then she will attempt to do a—but not, however, if she believes that a carries with it consequences much more hated than q is liked, or she believes she is incapable of (...) doing a, or she gets distracted from her goal that q, or she suddenly has a severe brain hemorrhage, or.... No one can say precisely where the list ends, but the idea is supposed to be clear enough: normally the law holds, but there are many cases, exceptions, one might say, in which the law does not; the difficulty of characterizing these exceptions invites the qualification ‘c.p.’ as a catch-all. (shrink)

Bringing together the latest work from leading scholars in this emerging and vibrant subfield of law, this book examines the philosophical issues that inform the intersection between law and neuroscience.

A close examination of Kim's argument in "Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction" for the claim that if a kind is multiply realizable in a way that blocks identification with more fundamental properties it is also a kind unlikely to appear as an appropriate kind in a theory in the first place. Ultimately, I argue that there is one reasonably promising argument of this sort, but its success turns on explanatory questions the answers to which are far from obvious.

In this paper, I want to explore the question of whether or not there are laws in psychology. Jaegwon Kim has argued (Supervenience and mind. MIT press, Cambridge; 1993; Mind in a physical world. MIT press, Cambridge 1998) that there are no laws in psychology that contain reference to multiply realized kinds, because statements about such kinds fail to be projectible. After reviewing Kim’s argument for this claim, I show how his conclusion hinges on a hidden assumption: that (...) a kind can only feature in a projectible statement if it is defined by an internal physical property. This assumption, however, is false: constrained kinds can feature in projectible statements, and yet they are not defined by any set of internal physical properties. I suggest that many mental terms actually refer to constrained kinds, and give an example from motor neuroscience of a constrained kind that is multiply realizable and “projectible”: the intention to move voluntarily in a specific direction. (shrink)

This volume centers on philosophical issues of the life sciences, particularly genetics and psychology, and the relevance of statistical data as the foundation for inductive reasoning in areas such as vaccination testing, population genetics, evolutionary theory, and natural selection. Also discussed is the role of psychology in defining thought processes, experiences, and behaviors and their subsequent relation to scientific discovery, and advancing knowledge of the human condition and human potential.

Book synopsis: This volume brings together international scholars working at the intersection of Spinoza studies and critical and feminist philosophy. It is the first book-length study dedicated to the re-reading of Spinoza’s ethical and theologico-political works from a feminist perspective. The twelve outstanding chapters range over the entire field of Spinoza’s writings—metaphysical, political, theological, ethical, and psychological—drawing out the ways in which his philosophy presents a rich resource for the reconceptualization of friendship, sexuality, politics, and ethics in contemporary life. The (...) clear and accessible Introduction offers a historical sketch of Spinoza’s life and intellectual context and indicates how Spinoza’s philosophy might be seen as a rich cultural resource today. Topics treated here include the mind-body problem and its relation to the sex-gender distinction; relational autonomy; the nature of love and friendship; sexuality and normative morality; free will and determinism and their relation to Christian theology; imagination and recognition between the sexes; emotion and the body; and power, imagination, and political sovereignty. The essays engage in a rich and challenging conversation that opens new paths for feminist research. (shrink)

Laws, Mind, and Free Will is a highly valuable book for anyone interested in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, or in the problem of free will and moral responsibility. The book has three distinct but related parts. The first presents an anti-empiricist position on the laws of nature, according to which the point of the laws is not primarily to predict kinematic outcomes, but rather to characterize dynamics. One upshot of the account is that the laws have an attenuated (...) role in determining and prediction of actual motion, and this has an important consequence for the relevance of the laws to the prospects for libertarian free will. This consequence is developed in detail in the second part of the book. A further feature of the account is that proposed laws and the theories in which they are embedded are models in a sense that reflects our interests and involves idealization. In Horst’s view, this is true for theories and laws across the sciences—from physics to psychology. The l .. (shrink)

Coursebook on law and neuroscience, including the bearing of neuroscience on criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence.

The received view on the nature of legal authority contains the idea that a sound account of legitimate authority will explain how a legal authority has a right to command and the addressee a duty to obey. The received view fails to explain, however, how legal authority truly operates upon human beings as rational creatures with specific psychological makeups. This book takes a bottom-up approach, beginning at the microscopic level of agency and practical reason and leading to the justificatory framework (...) of authority. The book argues that an understanding of the nature of legal normativity involves an understanding of the nature and structure of practical reason in the context of the law, and advances the idea that legal authority and normativity are intertwined. This point can be summarised thus: if we are able to understand both how the agent exercises his or her practical reason under legal directives and commands and how the agent engages his or her practical reason by following legal rules grounded on reasons for actions as good-making characteristics, then we can fully grasp the nature of legal authority and legal normativity. Using the philosophies of action enshrined in the works of Elisabeth Anscombe, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the study explains practical reason as diachronic future-directed intention in action and argues that this conception illuminates the structure of practical reason of the legal rules' addressees. The account is comprehensive and enables us to distinguish authoritative and normative legal rules in just and good legal systems from 'apparent' authoritative and normative legal rules of evil legal systems. At the heart of the book is the methodological view of a 'practical turn' to elucidate the nature of legal normativity and authority. (shrink)

Although much recent social science and humanities work has been a revolt against simplification, this volume explores the contrast between simplicity and complexity to reveal that this dichotomy, itself, is too simplistic. John Law and Annemarie Mol have gathered a distinguished panel of contributors to offer—particularly within the field of science studies—approaches to a theory of complexity, and at the same time a theoretical introduction to the topic. Indeed, they examine not only ways of relating to complexity but complexity _in (...) practice._ Individual essays study complexity from a variety of perspectives, addressing market behavior, medical interventions, aeronautical design, the governing of supranational states, ecology, roadbuilding, meteorology, the science of complexity itself, and the psychology of childhood trauma. Other topics include complex wholes in the sciences, moral complexity in seemingly amoral endeavors, and issues relating to the protection of African elephants. With a focus on such concepts as multiplicity, partial connections, and ebbs and flows, the collection includes narratives from Kenya, Great Britain, Papua New Guinea, the Netherlands, France, and the meetings of the European Commission, written by anthropologists, economists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and scholars of science, technology, and society. _Contributors._ Andrew Barry, Steven D. Brown, Michel Callon, Chunglin Kwa, John Law, Nick Lee, Annemarie Mol, Marilyn Strathern, Laurent Thévenot, Charis Thompson. (shrink)

Hobbes has served for both philosophers and political scientists as the paradigm case of someone who held an egoistic view of human nature. In this article I shall attempt to show that the almost unanimous view that Hobbes held psychological egoism is mistaken, and further that Hobbes's political theory does not demand an egoistic psychology, but on the contrary is incompatible with psychological egoism. I do not maintain that Hobbes was completely consistent; in fact, I shall show that there (...) was a continuous development in Hobbes's works away from an egoistic psychology. But I do think that the main outlines of Hobbes's political theory, i.e., his account of the laws of nature, the right of nature, the obligations imposed by laws and covenants, and the rights and duties of citizen and sovereign, are essentially the same in The Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan. I thus hold that even in his earliest work, The Elements, the only one where a charge of egoism is justifiable, the political theory does not depend on egoism. But the first and most important point to be established is that Hobbes did not hold an egoistic psychology. (shrink)

David Gray Carlson and Peter Goodrich argue that the postmodern legal mind can be characterized as having shifted the focus of legal analysis away from the modernist understanding of law as a system that is unitary and separate from other aspects of culture and society. In exploring the various "other dimensions" of law, scholars have developed alternative species of legal analysis and recognized the existence of different forms of law. Carlson and Goodrich assert that the postmodern legal mind introduced a (...) series of "minor jurisprudences" or partial forms of legal knowledge, which both compete with and subvert the modernist conception of a unitary system of law. In doing so scholars from a variety of disciplines pursue the implications of applying the insights of their disciplines to law. Carlson and Goodrich have assembled in this volume essays from some of our leading thinkers that address what is arguably one of the most fundamental of interdisciplinary encounters, that of psychoanalysis and law. While psychoanalytic interpretations of law are by no means a novelty within common law jurisprudence, the extent and possibilities of the terrain opened up by psychoanalysis have yet to be extensively addressed. The intentional subject and "reasonable man" of law are disassembled in psychoanalysis to reveal a chaotic and irrational libidinal subject, a sexual being, a body and its drives. The focus of the present collection of essays is upon desire as an inner law, upon love as an interior idiom of legality, and represents a signficant and at times surprising development of the psychoanalytic analysis of legality. These essays should appeal to scholars in law and in psychology. The contributors are Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Peter Goodrich, Pierre Legendre, Alain Pottage, Michel Rosenfeld, Renata Salecl, Jeanne L. Schroeder, Anton Schutz, Henry Staten, and Slavoj Zizek. David Gray Carlson is Professor of Law, Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. Peter Goodrich is Professor of Law, University of London and University of California, Los Angeles. (shrink)

In organizational psychology the positive effects of democratically structured enterprises on their employees are well documented. However, the longstanding viability as well as economic success of democratic enterprises in a capitalistic market environment has long been contested. For instance, this has given rise to widespread endorsement of the “degeneration thesis” and the so-called “iron law of oligarchy”. By reviewing 77 qualitative studies that examined 83 democratic enterprises within the last 50 years, the present systematic review provides evidence that such (...) enterprises are able to economically survive and prosper. The majority of studied enterprises either resisted pressures toward degeneration or subsequently regenerated after undergoing degenerative processes. Only 9.5% fully degenerated in accordance with the degeneration thesis and the “iron law of oligarchy”, while 27.0% of the democratic enterprises showed diverse and mixed forms of degeneration tendencies, indicating that the notion of an “iron law” needs to be revised. Within the nine investigated cases of Mondragon not one single enterprise or group fully degenerated. Three cases showed degenerative tendencies, another three one degeneration tendencies and simultaneously regeneration, one case fully resisted degeneration tendencies and two cases regenerated. Further, this systematic review provides an overview of organizational and external conditions, non-/democratic or non-/participative practices and psychological phenomena that contribute to the degeneration, regeneration, or resistance to degeneration. The described examples of such practices may help practitioners to implement and maintain democratic structures and processes in contemporary organizations. (shrink)

Hodgkin and Huxley’s model of the action potential is an apparent dream case of covering‐law explanation in biology. The model includes laws of physics and chemistry that, coupled with details about antecedent and background conditions, can be used to derive features of the action potential. Hodgkin and Huxley insist that their model is not an explanation. This suggests either that subsuming a phenomenon under physical laws is insufficient to explain it or that Hodgkin and Huxley were wrong. I defend Hodgkin (...) and Huxley against Weber’s heteronomy thesis and argue that explanations are descriptions of mechanisms. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Philosophy‐Neuroscience‐Psychology Program, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, Wilson Hall, St. Louis, MO 63130; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader is e first work of the French legal philosopher Pierre Legendre to appear in English. Trained as a lawyer, a historian and a psychoanalyst, the work of Pierre Legendre has consistently confronted law with the teaching and methods of psychoanalysis. The present collection of essays addresses a fascinating and diverse set of themes including the doctrinal regulation of tears, dance and law, the desire for the absolute, the war of the texts, and the (...) power of the images. (shrink)

An introductory level text designed to explain and review basic ideas concerning the role of law in society. Assuming no previous knowledge of the field, the volume examines the theoretical and empirical dimensions of law in society from political, sociological, psychological and philosophical perspectives.

This book examines the most controversial issues concerning the use of pre-drafted clauses in fine print, which are usually included in consumer contracts and presented to consumers on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. By applying a multi-disciplinary approach that combines consumer's psychology and seller's drafting power in the logic of efficiency and good faith, the book provides a fresh and unconventional analysis of the existing literature, both theoretical and empirical. Moving from the unconscionability doctrine, it criticizes (and in some cases refutes) (...) its main conclusions based on criteria which are usually invoked to sustain the need for public intervention to protect consumers, and specifically related to Law (contract complexity), Psychology (consumer lack of sophistication criterion) and Economics (market structure criterion). It also analyzes the effects of different regulations, such as banning vexatious clauses or mandating disclosure clauses, showing that none of them protect consumers, but in fact prove to be harmful when consumers are more vulnerable, that is whenever sellers can exploit some degree of market power. In closing, the book combines these disparate aspects, arguing that the solution (if any) to the problem of consumer exploitation and market inefficiency associated with the use of contracts of adhesion in these contexts cannot be found in removing or prohibiting hidden clauses, but instead has to take into account the effects of these clauses on the contract as a whole. (shrink)

The current literature review is part of a project-based study exploring the perceptions of university students, scholars, and policymakers in Bulgaria on the issue of academic plagiarism. The paper focuses on plagiarism prevention. The review explores the issue of plagiarism in light of the psychological motivations behind the conscious act of the misconduct, outlining possible directions for minimizing the misconduct in academia in the areas of psychology, law and education separately and in combination. The current literature review considers the (...) misconduct of plagiarism as a universal phenomenon closely linked to the heuristics of human nature. The paper delves into the heuristics of human nature motivating the misconduct from personal, cultural, legal, and educational psychology perspectives, drawing general (universal) and specific (for the Bulgarian context) implications regarding culture and educational and legal policy. Creating, regulating and preserving an empathic, trauma-healing and value-oriented organisational environment in academia emerges as a positive point of convergence and synergy where psychology meets education, culture and the law. (shrink)

On one view of ethical development, someone not yet virtuous can reliably progress by engaging in what meaningfully resembles virtuous conduct. However, if the well-intended conduct is psychologically demanding, one's character, precisely because one is not yet virtuous, may worsen rather than improve. This risk of degradation casts doubt on the developmental view. I counter the doubt through one interpretation and one application of the Mengzi. In passage 2A2, invoking the image of a farmer who “helped” the crop grow by (...) pulling the sprouts, MENG Ke cautions, “do not help it grow.” I defend a novel interpretation: do not advance with a naïve negligence about your psycho-physiological constitution. I also show how to advance with realistic care by pointing out an overlooked application of a much-discussed cultivation technique illustrated in Mengzi 1A7: ethical reflection can conciliate one with one’s ongoing or past advanced action, lowering the action’s risk of degradation. (shrink)

The SPP is, among other things, a place where we discuss nagging and perennial problems on the bordermarches between philosophy and the sciences. Sometimes problems are nagging and perennial because they are deep and difficult. And sometimes they are merely an artifact, a shadow cast by our own way of formulating the problem. I should like to suggest to you that philosophy of mind suffers badly from being the last refuge of the best philosophy of science of the 1950's, and (...) that some of its problems are in fact illusions that could be dispelled by consideration of more recent developments in the philosophy of science. In particular, philosophy of psychology has been plagued by a famous contrast between its "ceteris paribus" laws and the "exceptionless" laws of the physical sciences. This has led to doubts about the scientific status of psychology, the status of psychological kinds as natural kinds, and even their ontological legitimacy. I argue here that this problematic is a consequence of assuming a particular analysis of scientific laws as (exceptionless) universally quantifed claims. This analysis has largely been rejected in contemporary philosophy of science. And more recent analyses that take notice of the role of idealization in scientific modeling both dissolve the nagging problem and shed new light upon differences between the sciences. (shrink)

This anthology provides an in-depth analysis and discusses the issues surrounding nudging and its use in legislation, regulation, and policy making more generally. The 17 essays in this anthology provide startling insights into the multifaceted debate surrounding the use of nudges in European Law and Economics. Nudging is a tool aimed at altering people's behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any option or significantly changing economic incentives. It can be used to help people make better decisions to influence human (...) behaviour without forcing them because they can opt out. Its use has sparked lively debates in academia as well as in the public sphere. This book explores who decides which behaviour is desired. It looks at whether or not the state has sufficient information for debiasing, and if there are clear-cut boundaries between paternalism, manipulation and indoctrination. The first part of this anthology discusses the foundations of nudging theory and the problems associated, as well as outlining possible solutions to the problems raised. The second part is devoted to the wide scope of applications of nudges from contract law, tax law and health claim regulations, among others. This volume is a result of the flourishing annual Law and Economics Conference held at the law faculty of the University of Lucerne. The conferences have been instrumental in establishing a strong and ever-growing Law and Economics movement in Europe, providing unique insights in the challenges faced by Law and Economics when applied in European legal traditions. (shrink)

Pursuing an analogy with the natural sciences, Lee McIntyre, in this first full-length defense of social scientific laws to appear in the last twenty years, upholds the prospect of the nomological explanation of human behavior against those who maintain that this approach is impossible, impractical, or irrelevant.