Chapter 8 examines regulatory rules, beginning with an examination of written rules. It underlines the inescapability of interpretive uncertainty and considers ways in which that uncertainty can be addressed, including varying the precision of rules, how they are specified, the publication of interpretive ‘guidance’ (sometimes called ‘soft law’) and the delegation of detailed standard-setting to ‘technical experts’.

This chapter makes three main arguments. First, ideas and practices of diplomacy have a multi-millennial history – much longer than is generally thought. Second, this long history has been characterised by both continuity and change. As a result, diplomacy has been as much adaptive as resistant to change. And third, that diplomacy is not diminishing in importance. To assess these claims, the chapter first addresses the issue of defining diplomacy, before examining the evolution of diplomacy in terms that may be characterised broadly as pre-modern, modern and postmodern. Finally, the chapter evaluates the relationship between diplomacy and the study of international relations.

I read Kripke’s sketches of our ordinary view of meaning in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language as attempts to highlight the features of meaning that enable us to draw the distinction between what seems right and what is right. I argue that Kripke thinks the best way to clarify these features of meaning is to describe metasemantic conditions that a speaker’s words must satisfy if the speaker is to be warranted in asserting a sentence in which the words occur. Although the view of meaning I attribute to Kripke is initially compelling, I argue that it rests on a subtle yet fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between what seems right and what is right.

Chapter Twelve addresses the circulation and reception of Shakespeare’s plays in the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century, showing how the non-classical elements of his drama vitally contributed to Romantic-period literature and culture. Beginning with a comparison of commemorations of the Bard’s bicentenary in various European capitals, the chapter then looks at his early reception in Germany and France. While Voltaire, Goethe, and Herder celebrated him as a natural genius, French critics realigned Shakespeare’s plays according to neoclassical rules. French audiences increasingly sought out melodrama, however, and accepted these ‘irregularities’, which also inspired Beaumarchais’s Figaro plays. The chapter demonstrates the productive convergences between Shakespearean drama and melodrama, pantomime, harlequinades and other popular theatrical forms, in particular as political satire. It then looks at how Tieck and A.W. Schlegel promoted Shakespeare as the supreme playwright and as part of the German opposition to Napoleon, leading to the banning of his plays in Vienna and elsewhere, and to many literary appropriations in Kleist, Goethe, and Schiller. The chapter concludes with a survey of some of Shakespeare’s influences on drama in Italy, Spain, and, again, France.

Chapter 1 begins with the distinction between reasoning from associations and reasoning from rules – a distinction that will resurface in subsequent chapters on creativity and innovation. The associative system is reproductive, automatic, and emphasizes similarity. The rule-based system is productive, deliberative, and emphasizes verification. Daniel Kahneman’s (2011) best-selling book Thinking Fast and Slow introduced readers to how associative and rule-based reasoning influence the speed of responses. The third section on biases in reasoning describes Kahneman’s classic research with Amos Tversky on how the use of heuristics such as availability and representativeness influence frequency estimates. The final section discusses monitoring reasoning in which people use knowledge to improve their thinking skills. Monitoring reasoning is a metacognitive skill that controls the selection, evaluation, revision, and abandonment of cognitive tasks, goals, and strategies.

Institutions are the system of legal rules and social norms that enhance individual economic property rights. Individuals take them as exogenous, but they are endogenous to the entire system. Institutions are complicated distributions of economic property rights and are therefore the result of attempts to maximize wealth net of the transaction costs involved. This chapter defines institutions, relates them to property rights, reviews the literature, and provides numerous examples of institutions and their evolution.

People are often reluctant to make decisions by calculating the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action in particular cases. Knowing, in addition, that they may err, people and institutions often resort to second order strategies for reducing the burdens of, and risk of error in, first-order decisions. They make a second-order decision when they choose one from among such possible strategies. They adopt rules or presumptions; they create standards; they delegate authority to others; they take small steps; they pick rather than choose. Some of these strategies impose high costs before decision but low costs at the time of ultimate decision; others impose low costs both before and at the time of ultimate decision; still others impose low costs before decision while exporting to others the high costs at the time of decision. Political, legal, and ethical issues are also raised by second-order decisions.

Over thirty years ago, Frank Klink and I wrote a paper on anarchy, authority, and rule—the first of its kind and a touchstone for subsequent theorizing about states and their relations. We sought to rebut prevailing claims about anarchy as the absence of authority and replace these concepts with a scheme centered on conditions of rule in every society. We identified three forms of rule: hegemony (inspired by Gramsci), hierarchy (drawing on Weber), and heteronomy (inspired by Kant, drawing on liberal theory). We argued that the relations of states exhibit elements of all three forms of rule to the abiding advantage of some few states. There is today a great deal of interest in rule in international relations but less interest in our three-part conceptual scheme. Looking back, I believe it holds up in its own terms but works even better when situated in an overarching framework linking three types of speech acts, derivative types of rules, and correlative forms of rule. I erected this framework in World of Our Making (1989) and reprise it here. I conclude by showing how modernity has reinvigorated status to support sovereign equality, thereby conjoining hegemony and hierarchy in a durably heteronomous world.

This chapter provides a broad overview of existing anthropological work on exemplars and proposes a new relational way of understanding exemplarity. Most existing philosophical and anthropological work on exemplarity has taken an explicitly functionalist approach. Academics have often valued exemplars because of their ‘articulatory power’ to connect the world of things with the world of ideas. This chapter advances this conversation by examining exemplarity as a relationship between persons and things rather than an attribute of either. In doing so, the chapter explores the social effort that is required to stabilize exemplars in the world, and it shows how the creation of exemplars always goes hand in hand with scepticism and critique. Finally, the chapter investigates whether the modern world has been overcome by scepticism towards exemplars such that we now face a ‘crisis of exemplarity’ in which only ‘everyday exemplars’ can be recognized.

Rules are a ubiquitous normative form across the human experience. The recent anthropology of ethics and morality has, however, tended to focus elsewhere, in part to redress a perceived earlier over-emphasis on rules within anthropology. Bourdieu’s scepticism as to the value of structuralist talk of rules, and favouring instead of ‘practice’, has been more widely influential. This chapter makes the case for a renewed and more sophisticated attention to rules within the anthropology of ethics. While the roots of anthropological rule scepticism lie in debates – often inspired by Wittgenstein – over whether the implicit norms of ‘ordinary’ social life should be thought of as ‘rules’, the prominence of explicit rules in many of the world’s great ethical traditions seems hard to ignore. And yet, the conceptual tools available to anthropologists for their nuanced ethnographic appreciation remain under-developed. Some potential resources from analytic and legal philosophy and moral theology are brought to bear on examples from the author’s research on the use of religious rules, specifically those of the Islamic sharia. Having demonstrated the diversity, complexity, and ethnographic interest of the practice of moral rules, the chapter ends by considering why some social contexts appear more ‘ruly’, or legalistic, than others.

This chapter provides an overview of approaches to formal modeling in the domain of categorization. The core psychological processes addressed by models are: generating a classification decision in response to a stimulus and constructing category representations based on supervised experience. A taxonomy is provided that organizes the formal models in terms of their use of a fixed, combined, or constructed approach to predicting categories under either a cue-based or item-based framework. The chapter gives in-depth coverage of a leading approach (exemplar models) as well as an emerging alternative: a constructed cue-based model (DIVA) that differs from competing accounts by learning to reconstruct the input features via sets of category-specific weights and using the degree of reconstructive success (i.e., goodness-of-fit to the category) to determine the likelihood of membership.

Chapter 1 surveys philosophers from the German and British aesthetic and intellectual traditions with which Kant directly engages in the third Critique and pre-Critical materials. What is the role of rules in his early aesthetics? Laying the foundation for some of the book’s later analyses, the chapter shows how the early Kant synthesizes ideas from his German and British predecessors.

This chapter looks at the tools and procedures that programmes use to assess claims. Assessing a redress claim involves deciding which injuries to redress and how much money to pay. Those judgements are difficult. Since people will reasonably disagree, good procedure is essential. Enabling survivors to choose how the programme will assess their claims can help protect survivors’ privacy and well-being and make programmes more effective and efficient.

By extension of the changing perspectives explored in Chapter 5, in Chapter 6 there follows an exploration of how far Keynes likewise yielded, in his economic thinking in the 1920s, to the realities of a new economic order, challenging his former attachment to the gold standard. The argument here is that the crucial attraction of the gold standard was its rule-bound rationale; yet Keynes, under the impact of events, became disillusioned with a set of rules that now seemed to him less benign in the post-war world. At one level, he criticised the newly powerful United States for failing to exercise its hegemonic influence in the benign manner he had once imputed to British hegemony. At another level, he became sceptical of rules that only debtor countries had to observe, with adverse deflationary effects worldwide.

This chapter makes the case for judicial morality as a safeguard against result-selective reasoning, a decision-making flaw especially pernicious in human rights adjudication. Human rights claims are more value-laden than other judicial work. They can tempt judges to depart from disciplined judging according to the rule of law. One purpose of the rule of law is to constrain discretionary judicial power. Research into the psychology of judging supports the need for constraints. But the legal system affords opportunities – margins of judicial manoeuvre – to engage in result-selective reasoning, from the indeterminacy of human rights texts, the replacement of rules with standards, and the adoption of proportionality analysis. The rule of law’s constraints are not self-enforcing and cannot safeguard against the failure of judges to abide by them. What is required is commitment to judicial morality comprising the modes of judicial responsibility: do no harm, and then, do the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way, at the right time, and in the right words. When judges neglect these moral imperatives, they undermine the quest for consistent adjudication that underpins justice.

The sixth chapter examines the relationship between coutumiers as texts that describe custom, and custom in practice. The difficulty with discussing this is that the coutumiers only begin to be cited in court records at the very end of the thirteenth century and very rarely even then. This was not unusual for the lay courts of northern France in this period, which cited ‘custom’ and not lawbooks or specific precedents. I discuss the relationship between the coutumiers and representations of practice – as filtered through its documentary record-keeping – in two ways. On one level, this chapter shows how at least some people were thinking about court cases that they presided over, took part in, witnessed or heard about. On another, this chapter demonstrates how the coutumier represents practice differently from other remaining records and how coutumier authors used what they saw in practice to extract principles and articulate general rules. Through the coutumiers, we can see how individual actors reshaped specific cases and transactions into general principles, and those general principles into a body of customary law.

Worldwide communication in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is enacted between people from different linguacultural backgrounds, so it would seem self-evident that it is inter cultural in its very nature. Pragmatically, however, it is not essentially different from “monolingual” / “intracultural” communication. In both cases, participants have to bring their diverse linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions into convergence on common ground. To conceive of this diversity as relating only to different named languages and the cultures associated with them is to disregard the vast variation in linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions that obtains within so-called monolingual communities. So to describe the use of ELF as exceptionally multilingual and intercultural is to misrepresent it as a distinct way of communicating. What makes ELF distinctive, and a significant area of study, is not that it is a different kind of communication, but on the contrary, that it so clearly brings out how communication works in general: since the degree of linguistic and schematic disparity between participants is likely to increase the challenge of convergence, the pragmatic process of achieving convergence will naturally become particularly apparent.