The Logic of Choice [antikvár]

The concept of rule is shrouded in confusion and controversy. Yet rules are relied upon and used in a very wide range of fields: language, law, ethics, games and logic, to mention but a few. The use of rules involves an equally wide range of difficulties not the least of which is related to the notion of rationality itself. It is with the concepts of rule and rationality, with the use and application of rules and with the choices and decisions that they call for that we shall be principally concerned in this book.Both the concept and the use of rules are embroiled in a series of fundamental controversies. Questions have been raised about the philosophical status of rules in the light of theories asserting the exclusive 'meaningfulness' of empirical and logical knowledge. These questions have arisen in connection with attempts to reduce legal rules to correlatives of observable human behaviour and in connection with attempts to exclude 'metaphysical' - factually meaningless - knowledge from legal and ethical theory. Moreover, questions about the status of rules have gained added urgency from the writings of the American and Scandinavian 'Realists'.Other questions have arisen about the rationality of reasoning purporting to rely on rules for guidance. Commentators have in-dicated that such reasoning can be neither deductive nor inductive and that it certainly is not scientific. The implication has been that rule-guided reasoning is either not rational or that the concept of rationality itself requires fresh investigation. This implication may have played a role in the growth of an important new school of jurisprudence in Belgium which assimilates legal argumentation to a species of rhetoric.Equally grave and far-reaching doubts have been expressed about the adequacy of theories of statutory interpretation and precedent which account for the use of rules in legal systems. These doubts have been accompanied by significant controversies about neutral and principled judicial decision-making which agitate observers of the American constitutional scene. At the same time an important scholarly debate has been pursued about the relative role of rules,