Andy Yu

What explains the continuity of legal systems over time? The existing accounts of continuity, I suggest, face various challenges. I consider five existing accounts: (1) the basic-norm-based account, (2) the rule-of-recognition-based account, (3) the state-based account, (4) the reasonableness-based account and (5) the official-recognition-based account. I focus on challenges for the official-recognition-based account, as it is the most recent contribution to the literature, and it sets the stage for the account that I propose. In this article, I propose an alternative account: the popular-recognition-based account, which holds that a legal system continues to exist just if the people recognise it continues to exist. The account incorporates the key insight of the official-recognition-based account, namely that the continuity of a legal system depends on social recognition, but it takes the social recognition to come from the people rather than only the legal officials. In short, I propose that popular recognition grounds the existence, identity and continuity of a legal system. This account, I suggest, vindicates certain features of existing accounts, including the compelling idea that the people somehow explain what legal systems there are, and accommodates various examples that existing accounts have trouble accommodating.

Differences among scientific, mathematical, and ethical subject matters motivate a pluralism where distinct domains of subject matter are associated with distinct truth properties and logics. However, it is unclear how such pluralism might accommodate potentially attractive epistemic norms, such as that one ought to believe only what is true, and that one ought to believe what is logically true. In this paper, I show how such pluralism can accommodate such norms by supplementing the account developed in my other work with epistemic, doxastic, and deontic operators. The upshot is that pluralism is compatible with, even if not committed to, monism about epistemic norms.

In The Right to Know: Epistemic Rights and Why We Need Them (Routledge, 2021), Lani Watson comprehensively examines the right to know and other epistemic rights, that is, rights to goods such as information, knowledge and truth. These rights, she suggests, play a key role in society today, but we often do not attend to them in the way that we should. She draws our attention to these rights, illustrating their importance using a range of examples from medicine, politics and law, and she articulates a philosophical account of these rights. Her concise but book-length treatment of the topic is clear, accessible and rigorous. This is a considerable achievement, and I find Watson’s treatment of epistemic rights to be illuminating. I do wish she would say more to expand on her discussion of certain points, but overall, she succeeds in her project to shed light on an important but underdiscussed topic. In this critical contribution, I summarize her book and then raise three questions about her discussion. First, does Watson adopt a workable conception of law and morality, given her characterization of who can have epistemic rights? Second, does the law support Watson’s conception of epistemic rights and duties, as she claims it does? Third, does Watson focus on the harm-related rationale for epistemic rights to the apparent exclusion of other rationales?

Differences among scientific, mathematical, and ethical subject matters motivate a pluralism where distinct domains of subject matter are associated with distinct truth properties and logics. However, it is unclear how such pluralism might accommodate potentially attractive epistemic norms, such as that one ought to believe only what is true, and that one ought to believe what is logically true. In this paper, I show how such pluralism can accommodate such norms by supplementing the account developed in Yu (2017a,b) with epistemic, doxastic, and deontic operators. The upshot is that pluralism is compatible with, even if not committed to, monism about epistemic norms.

This thesis comprises three main chapters—each comprising one relatively standalone paper. The unifying theme is fragmentalism about truth, which is the view that the predicate “true” either expresses distinct concepts or expresses distinct properties. In Chapter 1, I provide a formal development of alethic pluralism. Pluralism is the view that there are distinct truth properties associated with distinct domains of subject matter, where a truth property satisfies certain truth-characterizing principles. On behalf of pluralists, I propose an account of logic and semantics that shows how they can answer central conceptual and logical challenges for their view. In Chapter 2, I motivate and develop a modal account of propositions on the basis of an iterative conception of propositions, where the modality is logico-mathematical. The modal account of propositions takes the conception to motivate an inherently potential hierarchy of propositions. I show that the account helps provide satisfying solutions to the intensional paradoxes of Russell-Myhill, Kaplan, and Prior. In Chapter 3, I propose that “true” is polysemous. I suggest that “true” is initially polysemous between correspondence truth and disquotational truth, and further polysemous between the meanings corresponding to the subconcepts of the concept truth generated by the indefinite extensibility of that concept. I show that the proposal provides satisfying solutions to the semantic paradoxes.

There have been few attempts to answer the twin challenges for alethic pluralists to maintain standard accounts of the logical operators and of logical consequence in a sufficiently systematic and precise way. In this paper, I propose an account of logic and semantics on behalf of pluralists that answers both challenges in a sufficiently systematic and precise way. Crucially, the account accommodates mixed atomics, and its first-order extension also accommodates quantified sentences. Accordingly, pluralists can answer all the distinctively logical challenges for their view.