Andrew Botterell

Imagine the following. You have been asked to critically evaluate the criminal process in your home jurisdiction. In particular, you have been asked to determine whether the criminal process currently in place appropriately balances the need to maximize the chances of getting things right—of acquitting the innocent and convicting the guilty—with the need to minimize the chances of getting things wrong—of acquitting the guilty and convicting the innocent. How would you proceed? What rules of evidence and procedure would you put in place? Would you exclude germane inculpatory evidence that has been obtained in violation of the accused’s constitutional rights? Would you permit spouses to testify against each other, or allow the jury to draw adverse inferences from an accused’s failure to testify on his or her behalf? These are the sorts of epistemological issues addressed by Larry Laudan in his superb Truth, Error, and Criminal Law. The purpose of legal epistemology is to identify legal rules in order to assess them rationally, and, if necessary, to modify or replace them. The more and more widely Truth, Error, and Criminal Law is read, the more likely it is that legal epistemology will attract the attention of lawyers, legal academics, and philosophers, attention that can only contribute in a positive way to rethinking criminal law.

According to a familiar and influential view, rights are not absolute. To the contrary, they can sometimes be permissibly interfered with. I find such a view of rights attractive. John Oberdiek thinks otherwise. In a recent paper in this journal, Oberdiek has argued that any account of rights that incorporates a distinction between infringing and violating a right is indefensible. My aim in this paper is to argue that Oberdiek's worries are misplaced. The paper proceeds as follows. After some terminological stage-setting I present a familiar puzzle about rights and compensation and argue that the proper response to the puzzle is to distinguish between various ways in which rights can be interfered with. I then turn to a discussion of the general theoretical picture on which this account of rights rests, and I present some reasons for thinking that Oberdiek's criticisms of that picture are not successful. My conclusion is that the distinction between infringing and violating a right is a plausible one, and that an account of rights that rests on it is not for that reason problematic.

From the time of Descartes to about the 1960s, a certain epistemological idea dominated the philosophy of mind, namely the idea that theses about the relation between mind and body are, if true, a priori truths. Much of recent philosophy of mind is devoted to the question whether that idea is right. My research is largely an attempt to argue that some recent defenses of it are unsuccessful. ;For example, Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that every actual psychological event, property, or process is necessitated by some actual physical event, property, or process. Many philosophers believe that Physicalism is true. Until about the 1960s, those who believed it true typically believed that statements relating mind and body were a priori truths. Let us call this thesis A Priori Physicalism. Many philosophers nowadays believe, instead, that statements relating mind and body are only a posteriori truths. Let us call this thesis A Posteriori Physicalism. A number of philosophers have argued in recent years that A Posteriori Physicalism is unacceptable; on their view, Physicalists had better be A Priori Physicalists. My thesis examines the question whether that view is correct. ;I begin with a discussion of two influential arguments for the conclusion that Physicalists must be A Priori Physicalists. Chapter 1 addresses itself to an argument for the conclusion that if physicalism is true, every referring psychological expression is coreferential a priori with some referring physical expression. This argument is commonly called the Property Dualism Argument against Physicalism. I argue that the Property Dualism Argument rests on an ambiguous premise: on one reading it begs the question against A Posteriori Physicalism, on the other reading the conclusion of the Property Dualism Argument does not follow. ;Chapter 2 addresses itself to an argument of Frank Jackson's for the conclusion that Physicalists must have an a priori story to tell about how the physical nature of the actual world makes true the psychological nature of the actual world. I distinguish two ways in which this claim might be understood, and I argue that on neither way of understanding it does Jackson have a compelling argument for A Priori Physicalism. ;Finally, in Chapter 3 I turn to a more general discussion of the relation between conceivability and possibility, and its bearing on the dispute between A Priori and A Posteriori Physicalists. I focus in particular on a recent argument of David Chalmers' from the conceivability of so-called zombies to the conclusion that A Posteriori Physicalism is false. I argue that this argument fails to provide compelling reasons for rejecting A Posteriori Physicalism. I argue, first, that it misconstrues the relation between conceivability and possibility, and second, that it fails to establish that zombies are conceivable in the relevant sense