Open texture is a term in the philosophy of Friedrich Waismann, first introduced in his paper Verifiability to refer to the universal possibility of vagueness in empirical statements.[1] It is an application of some of the ideas of posited by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, particularly Section 80.[2] The concept has become important in criticism of verificationism and has also found use in legal philosophy.
Friedrich Waismann was an Austrian mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. He is best known for being a member of the Vienna Circle and one of the key theorists in logical positivism.
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine that only statements that are empirically verifiable are cognitively meaningful, or else they are truths of logic (tautologies).
In legal philosophy, open texture reinforces the notion that vagueness is an inevitable feature of legal languages.[3] Legal philosophers who subscribe to Waismann's view believe that such "vagueness" solves the conceptual confusions of ordinary language.[3] According to H.L.A. Hart, for instance, language in legal rules has open texture and that recognizing this view would lead to better policy outcomes.[2] Another interpretation also cited that open texture is closely related to the concept of "unforeseen contingencies" in the economic field.[4]
Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart, FBA, usually cited as H. L. A. Hart, was a British legal philosopher, and a major figure in political and legal philosophy. He was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. His most famous work is The Concept of Law, which has been hailed as "the most important work of legal philosophy written in the twentieth century". He is considered one of the world's foremost legal philosophers in the twentieth century, alongside Hans Kelsen.
1 2 Tiersma, Peter Meijes; Tiersma, Peter; Solan, Lawrence (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.149. ISBN9780199572120.
1 2 Urbina, Sebastián (2002). Legal Method and the Rule of Law. The Hague: Kluwer Law International. p.81. ISBN9041118705.
↑ Ronzitti, Giuseppina (2011). Vagueness: A Guide. Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media. p.129. ISBN9789400703742.
Jurisprudence or legal theory is the theoretical study of law. Scholars of jurisprudence seek to explain the nature of law in its most general form and provide a deeper understanding of legal reasoning, legal systems, legal institutions, and the role of law in society.
Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle. Also called verificationism, this would-be theory of knowledge asserted that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful. Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians formed the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism.
Philosophy of law is a branch of philosophy that examines the nature of law and law's relationship to other systems of norms, especially ethics and political philosophy. It asks questions like "What is law?", "What are the criteria for legal validity?", and "What is the relationship between law and morality?" Philosophy of law and jurisprudence are often used interchangeably, though jurisprudence sometimes encompasses forms of reasoning that fit into economics or sociology.
In philosophy, vagueness refers to an important problem in semantics, metaphysics and philosophical logic. Definitions of this problem vary. A predicate is sometimes said to be vague if the bound of its extension is indeterminate, or appears to be so. The predicate "is tall" is vague because there seems to be no particular height at which someone becomes tall. Alternately, a predicate is sometimes said to be vague if there are borderline cases of its application, such that in these cases competent speakers of the language may faultlessly disagree over whether the predicate applies. The disagreement over whether a hotdog is a sandwich suggests that “sandwich” is vague.
A fact is a thing that is known to be consistent with objective reality and can be proven to be true with evidence. For example, "this sentence contains words" is a linguistic fact, and "the sun is a star" is a cosmological fact. Further, "Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States" and "Abraham Lincoln was assassinated" are also both facts, of the historical type. All of these statements have the epistemic quality of being "ontologically superior" to opinion or interpretation — they are either categorically necessary or supported by adequate historical documentation.
Legal positivism is a school of thought of analytical jurisprudence largely developed by legal thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. While Bentham and Austin developed legal positivist theory, empiricism set the theoretical foundations for such developments to occur. The most prominent legal positivist writer in English has been H. L. A. Hart, who, in 1958, found common usages of "positivism" as applied to law to include the contentions that:
Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law and is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science, i.e., rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses have to be tested against observations of the world.
Ordinary language philosophy is a philosophical methodology that sees traditional philosophical problems as rooted in misunderstandings philosophers develop by distorting or forgetting what words actually mean in everyday use. "Such 'philosophical' uses of language, on this view, create the very philosophical problems they are employed to solve." Ordinary language philosophy is a branch of linguistic philosophy closely related to logical positivism.
The Concept of Law is a 1961 book by the legal philosopher HLA Hart and his most famous work.TheConcept of Law presents Hart's theory of legal positivism—the view that laws are rules made by humans and that there is no inherent or necessary connection between law and morality—within the framework of analytic philosophy. Hart sought to provide a theory of descriptive sociology and analytical jurisprudence. The book addresses a number of traditional jurisprudential topics such as the nature of law, whether laws are rules, and the relation between law and morality. Hart answers these by placing law into a social context while at the same time leaving the capability for rigorous analysis of legal terms, which in effect "awakened English jurisprudence from its comfortable slumbers".
Inductionism is the scientific philosophy where laws are "induced" from sets of data. As an example, one might measure the strength of electrical forces at varying distances from charges and induce the inverse square law of electrostatics. This concept is considered one of the two pillars of the old view of the philosophy of science, together with verifiability. An application of inductionism can show how experimental evidence can confirm or inductively justify the belief in generalization and the laws of nature.
In logic, defeasible reasoning is a kind of reasoning that is rationally compelling, though not deductively valid.
Timothy Williamson is a British philosopher whose main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. He is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and fellow of New College, Oxford.
Language, Truth, and Logic is a 1936 work of philosophy by Alfred Jules Ayer. It brought some of the ideas of the Vienna Circle and the logical empiricists to the attention of the English-speaking world.
Gordon Park Baker was an American-English philosopher. His topics of interest included Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, Friedrich Waismann, Bertrand Russell, the Vienna Circle, and René Descartes. He was noted for his collaboration with Peter Hacker and his disagreements with Michael Dummett.
Peter Pagin is Professor of Philosophy at Stockholm University. He is a specialist in the philosophy of language and has worked extensively on foundational issues in semantics and on technical and philosophical problems about the compositionality of meaning.
This is an index of articles in philosophy of language
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