Guilherme Almeida

There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purposes to physical objects and to rules. In both cases, purpose attributions appear to be governed not so much by original intention or by moral value as by current practice. We argue that these findings in the cognitive science of purpose attribution have implications for jurisprudential questions involving purposivist legal interpretation.

In discussing whether legal systems are necessarily coercive, legal philosophers usually appeal to thought experiments involving angels or other morally driven beings who need no coercion to organise their social lives. Such appeals have invited criticism. Critics have not only challenged the relevance of such thought experiments to our understanding of legal systems; they have also argued that, contrary to the intuitions of most legal philosophers, the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’ would not hold that there is law in a society of angels because the view that law is necessarily coercive ‘enjoys widespread support among laypersons’. This is obviously an empirical claim. Critics, however, never systematically polled the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’. We boarded that bus. This article discusses findings from five empirical studies on the relationship between law and coercion.

Disagreement on law’s relationship to morality has long been driven by disagreement about our ordinary concept. Until recently, however, there had been no systematic investigation of lay intuitions. In this paper, we advance this nascent effort. Across two studies (N = 697), our findings reveal that most people consider law to be more than a matter of political circumstance alone. Contrary to the expectations of most contemporary philosophers, morality (both substantive and procedural) emerges as a key influence on judgments of legal validity: many people say that conduct prohibited by immoral statutes is not truly illegal, and that immoral conduct which was never explicitly prohibited is truly illegal. This suggests that people often treat law as a dual character concept that, like the concepts of scientist or of artist, features autonomous concrete and abstract dimensions.

The more we rely on digital assistants, online search engines, and AI systems to revise our system of beliefs and increase our body of knowledge, the less we are able to resort to some independent criterion, unrelated to further digital tools, in order to asses the epistemic reliability of the outputs delivered by them. This raises some important questions to epistemology in general and pressing questions to applied to epistemology in particular. In this paper, we propose an experimental method for the assessment of GPT-3’s capacity to generate consistent and coherent sets of outputs. When several outputs to one and the same input are very repetitive they tend to be consistent with each other, that is they do not contradict each other. But consistency does not make the set of outputs as a whole more informative than the outputs considered individually. We argue that the less informative a set of outputs is, the less coherent it is. We establish a conceptual distinction between consistency and coherence in the light of what some epistemologists refer to as a coherence theories of truth and justification. While much attention has been given to GPT-3’s capacity to produce internally coherent individual outputs, we argue, instead, that more attention should be given to its capacity to produce consistent and coherent outputs generated on a single-input-multiple-outputs basis.

Este texto se configura enquanto um ensaio sobre a análise das dinâmicas do olhar nas pornochanchadas através da problematização das noções de visibilidade e percepção. O primeiro momento, dividido em duas partes, liga as dinâmicas de visibilidade, com base nas discussões propostas por Didi-Huberman (1998) e Xavier (2003), às problemáticas de erotismo, nojo e individualidade propostas por A Dama do Lotação (Neville d´Almeida, 1978), enquanto o segundo faz a ponte entre os modos de percepção, distração e atenção, a partir dos estudos de Merleau-Ponty (1984) e Crary (2013), e as especificidades de As Cangaceiras Eróticas (Roberto Mauro, 1974) enquanto pornochanchada que privilegia uma determinada abordagem do humor e do erotismo.

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a widespread tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which acts violate the rule. This tendency’s strength varied markedly across (k = 15) field sites, owing to cultural variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared to laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether, and consequently exhibited more pronounced textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: In a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (Ntotal = 5495) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an easily identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers and judges.