Jeffrey Sachs (McGill), "Ambiguity and the Rule of Law: Disorder as Strategy in the Age of Empire"
Other
Theorists of modern state formation, as well as many scholars of legal pluralism, usually offer some variant of the “Standardization Model” to explain state behavior toward law and legal institutions. In essence, they claim that the state is primarily interested in rendering the law “legible…
Jakob Hohwy (Monash), "Phenomenally social: the private and public nature of conscious experience"
Other
Conscious experience is usually portrayed as so inherently private that its actual role in our cognitive lives becomes deeply puzzling. This talk discusses a solution to this puzzle, suggested by social cognitive neuroscience: that the role of conscious experience is in fact social. Introspected…
Karen Jones (Melbourne), "Rational Self-Governance as Trajectory Dependent"
Other
What is the role and authority of conscious reflective judgment in our rational self-governance, given it plays such a small part in deciding what to do and what to believe? In this paper, I defend a new model of rational self-governance according which whether an act or belief counts as an…
Christian List (LSE): Where do preference come from?
Other
Abstract: Rational choice theory analyzes how an agent can rationally act, given his or her preferences, but says little about where those preferences come from. Instead, preferences are usually assumed to be fixed and exogenously given. We introduce a framework for conceptualizing preference…
Patrick Dunleavy (London School of Economics), "Getting Better at Measuring Political Power"
Other
The concept of power has long been considered problematic, and is now unfashionable in analytic political science. This paper seeks to revive its use as a quantitative concept by formulating a measure of ‘organized power’ (excluding charismatic power and force) that will carry wider agreement than…
John Broome (Oxford), "Rationality Through Reasoning"
Other
I shall examine the nature of reasoning as something we do, the criteria of correct reasoning, and how reasoning can bring us to satisfy requirements of rationality. As an application, I shall explain how correct reasoning can bring us to intend to do what we believe we ought to do.