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Antirealist views about morality claim that moral facts do not exist. An interesting question to raise about these views is whether they imply that other types of normative facts, such as epistemic facts, do not exist. This book develops the argument that they do. That is, it contends that moral and epistemic facts are sufficiently similar that, if moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts also do not exist. But epistemic facts (facts that concern reasons for belief), it is argued, do exist. So, moral facts also exist. And if moral facts exist, then moral realism is true. This argument provides not simply a defence of a robustly realist view of ethics, but a positive argument for this position. In so doing, it engages with sophisticated sceptical positions in epistemology, such as error theories, expressivist views, and reductionist views of epistemic reasons. These positions, it is claimed, come at a high theoretical cost. It follows that realism about both epistemic and moral facts is a position that we should find highly attractive.

This book examines the process through which a World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement panel formulates its conclusions with respect to the facts of a case, i.e., the process of fact-finding or process of proof. The Dispute Settlement Understanding provides general guidance but few direct answers to specific questions regarding the process of fact-finding, which has placed upon panels and the Appellate Body the responsibility to provide answers to those questions as they have arisen in the cases. This book reviews the extensive jurisprudence developed in the 14 years of operation of the WTO dispute settlement system with a view to (a) determining whether panels and the Appellate Body have set out optimal rules to govern the process of fact-finding and, to the extent that that is not the case; and (b) to make suggestions for improvement. This book analyses questions such as: (i) Which party bears the responsibility of ultimately convincing the panel of the truth of a fact (burden of proof)?; (ii) What quantum of proof is necessary to convince the panel (standard of proof)?; (iii) The role of the panel, disputing parties, and non-disputing parties (e.g,. experts, international organizations, private parties) in the development of the evidentiary record on which the panel bases its decision; (iv) The consequences of a party's failure to cooperate in the process of fact-finding; (v) How the parties can access the information which is necessary to prove their allegations; and (vi) The treatment of confidential business and governmental information. In assessing and making suggestions to improve the answers provided by panels to these questions, the book draws on the approaches followed in the two major legal systems of the world — the common law and the civil law — and to the extent possible, the approaches adopted by other international courts and tribunals.

Understanding human beings and their distinctive rational and volitional capacities is one of the central tasks of philosophy. The task requires a clear account of such things as reasons, desires, emotions, and motives, and of how they combine to produce and explain human behaviour. Kinds of Reasons offers a fresh and incisive treatment of these issues, focusing in particular on reasons as they feature in contexts of agency. The account offered builds on some important recent work in the area; but it takes its main inspiration from the tradition that receives its seminal contemporary expression in the writings of G. E. M. Anscombe, a tradition that runs counter to the broadly Humean orthodoxy that has dominated the theory of action for the past forty years. The book offers an alternative to the Humean view that our reason for acting are mental states: it explains and develops a distinctive version of the view that our reasons for acting are facts, and defends it against difficulties that have been thought to be insurmountable. In addition, it proposes an account of the relation between reasons and desires, and of the role these play in practical reasoning and in the explanation of action.

This book presents the thesis that knowledge is an absolutely fundamental relation, with an indispensable role to play in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and philosophy of mind and language. Knowledge has been generally assumed to be a propositional attitude like belief. But this book argues that knowledge is not a relation to a content; rather, it's a relation to a fact. This point of view allows us to explain many of the concepts of philosophical logic in terms of knowledge. The book provides a theory of facts as structured combinations of particulars and universals, and presents a theory of content as the property of a mental act that determines its value for getting knowledge. It also defends a theory of representation in which the conceptual structure of content is taken to picture the fact it represents. This permits definitions to be given of reference, truth, and necessity in terms of knowledge. Turning to the metaphysics of mind and language, the book argues that a conscious state is one that is identical with knowledge of its own occurrence. This allows us to characterize subjectivity, and, by illuminating the ‘I’-concept, allows us to gain a better understanding of the concept of a person. Language is then explained in terms of knowledge, as a device used by a community of persons for exchanging knowledge by testimony. The book concludes that knowledge is too fundamental to be constituted by something else, such as one's functional or physical state; other things may cause knowledge, but do not constitute it.

This book is an original examination of attempts to dislodge a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the idea that our thoughts and utterances are representations of slices of reality. Representations that are accurate are usually said to be true, to correspond to the facts—this is the foundation of correspondence theories of truth. A number of prominent philosophers have tried to undermine the idea that propositions, facts, and correspondence can play any useful role in philosophy, and formal arguments have been advanced to demonstrate that, under seemingly uncontroversial conditions, such entities collapse into an undifferentiated unity. The demise of individual facts is meant to herald the dawn of a new era in philosophy, in which debates about scepticism, realism, subjectivity, representational and computational theories of mind, possible worlds, and divergent conceptual schemes that represent reality in different ways to different persons, periods, or cultures evaporate through lack of subject matter. By carefully untangling a host of intersecting metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and logical issues, and providing original analyses of key aspects of the work of Donald Davidson, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Kurt Gödel (to each of whom a chapter is dedicated), Stephen Neale demonstrates that arguments for the collapse of facts are considerably more complex and interesting than ever imagined. A number of deep semantic facts emerge along with a powerful proof: while it is technically possible to avoid the collapse of facts, rescue the idea of representations of reality, and thereby face anew the problems raised by the sceptic or the relativist, doing so requires making some tough semantic decisions about predicates and descriptions. It is simply impossible, Neale shows, to invoke representations, facts, states, or propositions without making hard choices—choices that may send many philosophers scurrying back to the drawing board. The book will be crucial to future work in metaphysics, the philosophy of language and mind, and logic, and will have profound implications far beyond.

This book engages with major philosophical questions concerning time and space — a framework for the investigation being provided by the debate between the absolutists and the relationists, so between Newton and Leibniz, and their followers. The investigation brings to the fore questions of the nature and reality of time and space, and leads on to more recent debates, as those relating to their possible infinitude, to anti-realism, time travel, temporal parts, geometry, convention, and the direction of time. These in turn raise more general issues, issues involving such concepts as those of identity, objectivity, causation, facts, and verifiability. Their examination falls within metaphysics, thought of as the investigation and analysis of fundamental philosophical concepts, but there is also metaphysics of a more contentious character, where the subject-matter is provided by propositions which transcend what can be known either through experience or by pure reasoning. In this connection, a central aim is to show how, without dismissing them as nonsensical, we may arrive at a fruitful interpretation of such propositions. While the focus of the work is not primarily on issues which presume an understanding of physical theory, it is hoped that the arguments developed will throw some light on relevant scientific concerns.

This book explores the implications of taking a vigorously democratic approach to issues of traditional legal theory. Allan C. Hutchinson introduces the democratic vision and examines the complementary philosophy of a Dewey-inspired pragmatism. This is followed by an examination from a pragmatic perspective of the dominant theories of analytical jurisprudence in both their positivist and naturalist forms. The book emphasizes the contested concepts of “truth”, “facts”, and “law/morality relation” and explores what a more uncompromising democratic/pragmatic agenda for law and legal theory would entail. The author's intent is to contribute to the shift away from a technical and elite philosophical approach to jurisprudence to a more democratic engagement. It advances and follows through on the critical claim that there is no position of theoretical or political innocence. Like the law it seeks to illuminate, legal theory must recognize its own political and social setting as well as its own responsibilities. Moreover, whatever else democracy might entail or imply, it opposes elite rule whether by autocrats, functionaries or theorists, however enlightened or principled their proposals or interventions may be: authority must come from below, not above.

The dominant approach to evaluating the law of evidence takes the standpoint of a detached observer and focuses on how the trial system should be structured to guard against the production of wrong verdicts. This book offers a different account from the perspective of the person responsible for making findings of fact. From that angle, complex and intertwining ethical and epistemic considerations come into view. After setting the stage with an introduction to general aspects of fact-finding and an analysis of the epistemology of trial deliberation, the two approaches are applied to three core areas of evidence law: the standards of proof, the rules on hearsay, and ‘similar facts’ (or, as it is also called, ‘previous misconduct’ or ‘other crimes, wrongs, or acts’). The author argues that it is only by exploring the nature and content of deliberative responsibility that the role and purpose of much of the law can be fully understood. In many cases, values other than truth have to be respected, not simply as side-constraints on, but as values which are internal to legal fact-finding. A party does not merely have a right to have the substantive law correctly applied to true findings of fact; she has, more broadly, a right to a just verdict, where justice incorporates an ethical evaluation of the reasoning process which led to the verdict and is conceived as a relational concept that stresses the virtue of emphatic care. There is an important sense in which the court must not only find the truth to do justice, it must do justice in finding the truth.

Defends a dynamic, or tensed, conception of time, according to which the past and the present are real while the future is not. This conception differs from traditional tensed views, according to which tensed facts are more basic than tenseless ones; on the contrary, tensed facts reduce to tenseless ones.

The conception of time defended is supported by arguments from causation: there can be causation only in a world where the past and the present are real, while the future is not.

Further, the direction of time can be defined by the direction of causation, and causation can be used to analyse temporal relations such as the relations of simultaneity and temporal priority.

The dynamic conception of time developed is contrasted with alternative views and defended against numerous philosophical objections.

It is also defended against implications of the Special Theory of Relativity: A modified version of the Special Theory of Relativity that allows for absolute simultaneity is suggested.