1. For a discussion, see Priest, Graham, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent, 2nd ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Timothy Williamson, “Conceptual Truth” (2006) 80:1 Aristotelian Society 1.

2. See, e.g., Parfit, Derek, On What Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar at 490 ff. For an earlier but important discussion, see Ian Hacking, “What is Logic?” (1979) 76:6 J Philosophy 285.

3. For recent statements of this position, see John Gardner, Law as a Leap of Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) ch 11 at 270 ff; Leslie Green, “Introduction” in HLA Hart, The Concept of Law, 3rd ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) at xlv-xlviii.

4. For readers interested in a further example of the use of a Kantian compliance-like idea in the legal philosophical literature, see John Gardner, Offences and Defences: Selected Essays in the Philosophy of Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) at 91 ff. Gardner argues that justification requires what he calls a correspondence between guiding and explanatory reasons, where the former indicate reasons that apply to one (regardless of whether one applies them) while the latter indicate reasons that one in fact applies (or uses to explain one’s actions).

5. The exception to this are nonstandard reasons, which require that one do as they require one to do but necessarily not for the reason that they require it. Promises can sometimes be nonstandard reasons. For instance, if A promises B to take care of B out of love for B, then A’s promise is not satisfied if A takes care of B because A promised to do so (or, on some accounts, even if A takes care of B out of love for B). The promise (and the love, on some accounts) must necessarily ‘stay in the background’ of the agent’s mind in order to be satisfied. On this topic, see Joseph Raz, From Normativity to Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) ch 3 at 36-59.

6. This description of actionable concepts therefore guards against the intuitive but incorrect interpretation that an action can be caused by a concept. The modest claim, put more abstractly, is that for such an action to be Y-type, it needs to be done for Y. The reader sceptical of this construction, however, is in sympathetic company as will become clear in the sections to follow.

7. See, e.g., Thomas Scanlon, “Promises and Practices” (1990) 19:3 Philosophy & Public Affairs 199. The relation between conceptual and analytic truths is complex. Some conceptual truths, like substantive ones, are not analytic. For an overview (albeit in the context of another topic), see the classifications in Thomas Nagel, “The Psychophysical Nexus” in Paul Artin Boghossian & Christopher Peacocke, eds, New Essays on the A Priori (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) 434. There are, moreover, different ways to classify the relation between conceptual truth and analyticity. Williamson prefers to reserve the term ‘conceptual truth’ for thoughts like ‘every vixen is a female fox’ while keeping the term ‘analytic’ for the corresponding sentence (see Williamson, supra note 1 at 5).

8. The discussion of analyticity that follows is drawn from Hacking, supra note 2.

9. Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, 2nd ed, translated by JL Austin (New York: Harper, 1960) at 4.

10. Hacking, supra note 2 at 286-89.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. WV Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) 60:1 Phil Rev 20.

14. Numerous examples, some formal, others empirical, support the Duhem-Quine thesis. See, e.g., Adelson’s Checker-Shadow Illusion: Adelson, Edward H, “Lightness Perception and Lightness Illusions” in Gazzinga, M, ed, The New Cognitive Neurosciences, 2nd ed (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000) at 339.Google Scholar The claim that no single sentence could be verified for its truth or falsity individually was accepted even by the mid-1930s, before Quine started writing (or at least it was accepted that almost no single sentence could be so verified). Carnap, for his part, accepted this by the mid-1930s.

15. Hacking, supra note 2 at 287.

16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, translated by GEM Anscombe & GH von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) § 410. Though, of course, Wittgenstein unlike Quine accepted the distinction between the analytic and synthetic. In respect of holism, Quine and Wittgenstein constitute starting points and therefore no rigorous defense or elaboration of their positions will be offered in this essay.

17. For a recent discussion, see Andrew Lugg, “W.V. Quine on Analyticity: ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ in Context” (2012) 51:2 Dialogue 231.

18. This may also have had something to do with geography and the ocean separating Oxford and Harvard. According to Dan Goldstick, for example, in the Oxford of Hart’s day, Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ was taken to have been completely refuted by HP Grice & PF Strawson’s ‘In Defence of Dogma’; and in the Harvard of Quine’s day, the analytic/synthetic distinction at the centre of much of Oxford philosophy was likewise seen to have been entirely refuted by ‘The Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. HP Grice & PF Strawson, “In Defense of Dogma” (1956) 65:2 Phil Rev 141.

19. See, e.g., HLA Hart, “Positivism, and the Separation of Law and Morals” and “Jhering’s Heaven of Concepts and Modern Analytical Jurisprudence”, both in HLA Hart, Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) especially 66 ff, discussing ‘formalism’, in the former essay and 271 ff discussing the linguistic methods of ‘analytical jurisprudence’ in the latter essay.

20. HLA Hart, The Concept of Law, 3rd ed by Leslie Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) at vii.

21. Raz, Joseph, Between Authority and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) at 53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, revised ed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) at 278.

23. Quine, WV, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013) at 61, see especially note 7.Google Scholar

24. “In Defense of Dogma”, supra note 18; Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) (though Kripke’s essay was not aimed at saving analyticity). See also Paul Artin Boghossian, “Analyticity Reconsidered” (1996) 30:3 Noûs 360.

25. Timothy AO Endicott, Vagueness in Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) at 79, 134-35.

26. Nicos Stavropoulos, Objectivity in Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) at 40 ff.

27. Andrei Marmor, Interpretation and Legal Theory (Oxford: Hart, 2005) at 47 ff.

28. See Brian Leiter, Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For critical commentary, see, e.g., Julie Dickson, “On Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Some Comments on Brian Leiter’s View of What Jurisprudence Should Become” (2011) 30 Law & Phil 477.

29. Leiter, supra note 28 at 175. Quine is doubtless important to Leiter’s attempts to demolish the analytic method of contemporary legal philosophy as he sees it, but it is to be observed that Quine, for his part, at least favoured appeals to intuition.

30. Not all such norms are deliberately made; the mandatory norms of customary law, for example.

31. For the main text on second-order reasons and how they compete against each other by weight and against first-order reasons by kind, see Raz, Joseph, Practical Reason and Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) at ch 1 and 2.Google Scholar The critical commentary is extensive. For recent offerings, see Christopher Essert, “A Dilemma for Protected Reason” (2012) 31:1 Law & Phil 49; Stephen L Darwall, Morality, Authority, and Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) ch 9 at 151.

32. In ordinary English, to engage in promissory behaviour is just to promise and do as one promised. What is more, one could not be sued in law for a contractual performance lacking the right spirit for morality, i.e., not as promissory behaviour. The usage I am considering, however, is a technical stipulative sense that is restricted to the formal requirement of the concept of a promise which holds that for an act φ to be promissory, it needs to be done for the reason of the promise to φ.

33. Michael S Moore seemed to have a similar investigation in mind when he described Raz’s project as an exercise in ‘analytical’ moral philosophy. See Michael S Moore, “Authority, Law, and Razian Reasons” (1989) 62:3 S Cal Law Rev 827 at 841-45.

34. This description is taken from John Broome, “Reasons” in RJ Wallace et al, eds, Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) ch 2 at 28. Broome, in turn, cites Parfit as his source. For a less well-known discussion, see Austin Duncan-Jones, Butler’s Moral Philosophy (London: Pelican, 1952) 77-86.

35. Practical Reason, supra note 31 at 25.

36. See, e.g., Timothy Macklem & John Gardner, “Reasons” in Jules L Coleman, Kenneth Einar Himma & Scott J Shapiro, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 440.

37. GWF Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed by AW Wood and translated by HB Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) at § 121.

38. For a discussion, see Leslie Green, The Authority of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) at 37 ff.

39. Ethics in the Public Domain, supra note 22 at 210, n 12.

40. One may observe, with Dan Goldstick, that the intuitively straightforward answer from a moral philosophical perspective is that a mandatory norm is likely to be best understood as prescribing compliance but being sufficiently satisfied through conformity. The straightforward answer, however, is not the one under consideration here. The point instead is to determine the requirements that necessarily attend mandatory norms in Raz’s legal philosophical theory of practical reason. Once this determination is made, it can be considered alongside the intuitively straightforward view just described.

41. Practical Reason, supra note 31 at 179.

42. I take bad faith to mean more than just a moral failing, which is perhaps the commonsensical way to understand it. Bad faith is at least here to be understood as indicating a failure of having the right motive, where ‘right motive’ is in turn to be stipulated by the setting in which the judgment of bad faith occurs. Thus we may have, for instance, aesthetic bad faith to describe not having the right aesthetic motive in matters of art—an example of which follows in the text. Bad faith in the legal domain is sometimes legally cognisable; for example, in American contract law one may bring suit under the doctrine of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. For a discussion, see Paul MacMahon, “Good Faith and Fair Dealing as an Underenforced Legal Norm” (2015) 99:6 Minn L Rev 2051.

43. Practical Reason, supra note 31 at 180 ff, 190. For a discussion, see Bruno Celano, “Are Reasons for Action Beliefs?” in LH Meyer, SL Paulson & TW Pogge, eds, Rights, Culture, and the Law: Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) at 40.

44. For a discussion, see Moore, supra note 33 at 875 ff. See also Raz’s response in the same issue: Joseph Raz, “Facing Up” (1989) 62 S Cal L Rev 1153 at 1174 ff.

45. Ethics in the Public Domain, supra note 22 at 207.

46. Practical Reason, supra note 31 at 185.

47. In the language of set theory, if the set of excluded reasons expands sufficiently to include conforming reasons, then what remains at the end of this function is the set of compliant reasons, upon which the exclusionary set cannot intrude without rendering the norm to which it belongs self-contradictory.

48. Ethics in the Public Domain, supra note 22 at 206.

49. Ibid at 211.

50. See, e.g., Philip Montague, “Learning Aesthetic Concepts and Justifying Aesthetic Judgments” (1979) 13:1 J Aesthetic Education 45.

51. Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) at 67 (see generally ch 3, ‘Formalists’ and ch 4, ‘In Pursuit of Form’).

52. Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism—History and Doctrine, 4th ed (The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter, 1980) at 206 ff.

53. Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) at 46-47.

54. Wilde’s trial, of course, was unrelated to rape.

55. See Wagner, Richard, The Artwork of the Future and Other Works, translated by Ellis, William Ashton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993);Google Scholar Finger, Anke & Follett, Danielle, eds, The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork: On Borders and Fragments (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).Google Scholar

56. Andrew Britton, “In Defense of Criticism” in Barry Keith Grant, ed, Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009) at 386.

57. Monica Bucciarelli, Sangeet Khemlani & PN Johnson-Laird, “The Psychology of Moral Reasoning” (2008) 3:2 Judgment & Decision Making 121 at 135 ff.

58. Joshua Greene & Jonathan Haidt, “How (and where) does moral judgment work?” (2002) 6:12 Trends in Cognitive Science 517 at 523. See also Jorge Moll et al, “Functional networks in emotional moral and nonmoral social judgments” (2002) 16:3 NeuroImage 696.

59. Vinod Goel et al, “Dissociation of mechanisms under syllogistic reasoning” (2000) 12:5 NeuroImage 504.

60. J Grafman & V Goel, “Neural Basis of Reasoning and Thinking” in L Nadel, ed, Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (Hoboken: Wiley, 2006) 875, 879. There are extensive studies on the interdependent processes of reasoning. For a general discussion, see Jonathan Baron, Thinking and Deciding, 4th ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

61. Cf Ethics in the Public Domain, supra note 22 at 204 ff on ‘domain-specific reasoning’. It will assist us to appreciate that practical reason cannot be reduced to the study of the brain. But it does not follow from this truism that the study of the brain does not entail insights for—or even restrictions upon—theories of practical reason. If, for instance, a particular model of practical reason requires us to reason about a norm R by way of a model of practical reason M, it follows that M requires us to use our brains in certain ways in respect of R. Whether our brains can accommodate M by thinking in the way that M requires is a good question, one that philosophers can engage more fruitfully by importing empirical knowledge of what our brains can and cannot do from fields such as cognitive science and neuroscience. The concern that our theories of practical reason must comport with the limits of our minds is an obviously vital one. Discussing Raz’s requirements for moral reasoning, Michael Moore made a similar remark: ‘It would be an odd and unfair morality that gave us objective reasons which we, because of our psychological equipment, could not incorporate into our practical reasoning processes’. See Moore, supra note 34 at 843. For related reading, see LA Perez Miranda, “Deciding, Planning, and Practical Reasoning: Elements towards a Cognitive Architecture” (1997) 11:4 Argumentation 435.

62. See, e.g., Ethics in the Public Domain, supra note 22 at 208; Gardner, supra note 3 at ch 6.

63. Ibid at ch 8.

64. For a discussion of the classical distinction in contemporary legal philosophy, see Gardner, supra note 3 at ch 6.

65. Ethics in the Public Domain, supra note 22 at 207.

66. I examine the issue in my essay “The Opaqueness of Rules”, which is under preparation.

67. Practical Reason, supra note 31 at 62.

68. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, 8th ed (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1882) at 655, cited in Practical Reason, supra note 31 at 59.

69. Practical Reason, supra note 31 at 25.

70. The priority of these premises is contested. See, e.g., Green, supra note 3 at xlvii.

71. Practical Reason, supra note 31 at 62, 74.

72. Hacking, supra note 2 at 33, citing Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2d ed (London: Gollancz, 1946) at 85. Strictly speaking, confidence in the sharpness of the analytic-synthetic distinction was admittedly waning throughout the 1930s and 40s, even by Carnap. Earlier sceptics included neo-Hegelians like Harold H Joachim, who wrote of the union of synthetic-analytic processes in our mental activity (what he called ‘synthetic analysis’). See Harold H Joachim, Logical Studies, ed by LW Beck (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948) especially at 38-55.

73. Ibid.

74. The intellectual history of analyticity of course is no argument for its demise or promise per se and it has not been the purpose of this essay to urge that an idea like analyticity is to be tested on the basis of its location in a particular historical narrative rather than its merits and demerits.

75. Hacking, supra note 2 at 85.