Cosim Sayid: Drafts
Queensboro Bridge (under construction), c. 1908.
Drafts of certain work (or abstracts thereof) will be made available here. E-mail me for more information. Work that’s under review is described within [brackets].
1. [A paper that wields the common-law’s standard civil evidentiary standard of mere likelihood as a cudgel against the knowledge-norm of assertion. The common-law is discussed as an evolutionary process that selects-for reasonable legal memes (such as the mere likelihood standard) as most justified in the sense that they’re neither excluded by applicable second-order reasons nor outweighed by non-excluded first-order reasons. The objection that the knowledge-norm is nonetheless honored in the breach is considered and rejected by looking at our habits of (pre-pandemic) social-distancing in response to alleged culpable norm-breaches. A decision-theoretic argument given by Voltaire is employed to show that the mere likelihood standard is the rational choice in ordinary civil cases where no party’s character is on the line and losses between the parties are symmetric. An objection that counts legal verdicts as non-assertoric is rejected by pointing it out its various speech-act theoretic shortcomings. A conclusion acknowledges that knowledge may be necessary for verdicts that cast aspersions on a party’s character or which license punishment, and it’s speculated that the constitutive theory of speech-acts is wanting as an adequate account of speech-acts. [completed September 2020, revised March 2020]]
2. [‘Legal Blueprints’.]
3. [‘Precedential Silencing’]
4. [‘Lies and their Close Associates’.]
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