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This chapter looks at letters-to-numbers problems, an interesting class of problems that entail many insightful strategies. Letters-to-numbers problems strongly fulfill the four conditions of demonstrability of Laughlin and Ellis (1986) and are thus highly intellective. Condition 1 is that the group members must agree on a conceptual system. Condition 2 is that there must be sufficient information. Condition 3 is that the member(s) who do not know the correct answer should be able to recognize it if it is proposed by another group member. Condition 4 is that the member(s) who do know the correct answer have sufficient ability, motivation, and time to demonstrate it to the incorrect member(s).

This concluding chapter proposes generalizations that emerge from theory and research on group problem solving and a brief retrospective and prospective. Group tasks are ordered on a continuum anchored by intellective and judgmental tasks. Intellective tasks have a demonstrably correct solution within a mathematical, logical, scientific, or verbal conceptual system. Judgmental tasks are evaluative, behavioral, or aesthetic judgments for which no generally accepted demonstrably correct answer exists. The underlying basis of the intellective-judgmental continuum is a continuum of demonstrability. The proportion of group members that is necessary and sufficient for a group response is inversely proportional to the demonstrability of the proposed response.

Buried beneath the intemperate rhetoric of Bentham’s attack on natural rights lies a serious challenge to the jurisprudence of rights in constitutional adjudication. The political rhetoric of rights, Bentham charged, is not the rhetoric of rational deliberation, but rather the rhetoric of mere assertion and counter-assertion. The language of rights supplies no determinate basis for deciding particular cases. However, Bentham saw clearly that indeterminacy threatens not objectivity—in the sense of a decision’s being ideally correct, or rationally preferred when seen “from nowhere”—but rather publicity. He argued that the indeterminacy of rights language weakens the rule of law, because it undermines conditions of genuine public justification. The language of rights provides no public standards for evaluating rights assertions. Bentham was correct to insist upon the importance of publicity in a democratic constitutional order. However, he mistakenly assumed that public justification is possible only if the demonstrability condition is met. In defense of constitutional rights jurisprudence, this chapter sketches an alternative conception of public justification and argues that public justification understood in this way is not threatened by indeterminacy.