How do people judge the sizes of things? What determines people’s evaluations of quantities such as prices or wages? People’s judgements and evaluations are typically relative; the same quantity will be judged or evaluated differently when it appears in different comparison samples. This chapter describes a simple psychological account – the Decision by Sampling model – of how sample-based judgements and evaluations are made. According to the model, what matters is the relative ranked position of an item within a comparison sample. For example, an income of $50,000 a year will be evaluated more favourably within a context of four lower and two higher incomes than in relation to one higher and five lower incomes. According to Decision by Sampling, estimates of the relative ranked position of items within comparison contexts are made by simple sampling and ordinal comparison processes. These estimates are assumed to underpin choice and valuation. The chapter reviews the Decision by Sampling model, relates it to other models such as Adaptation Level Theory and Range Frequency Theory, and shows how it can explain the shape of utility curves and probability weighting functions. The relation of coding efficiency to rank-based models is also discussed.

Given the plurality of uses to which the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘ritual’ are put, we focus on only one tradition of thought about their relationship, namely that stemming from Austin – in which ritual is understood as an act or as a particular modality of action with ethical entailments. After elaborating this position in the first half of the essay, we juxtapose it with an ethnographic description of life in northern Uganda. The ethnography serves both to support aspects of the formal argument and to show that conditions ‘on the ground’ readily escape any formal model. If ritual performance sets the criteria for ethical judgement, ethical concerns establish the choice of ritual performed. Ethical life is shaped by ritual enactment yet is also challenged by circumstances beyond what any given ritual, liturgical order, or theoretical apparatus can provide.

What motivates gratuitous behaviour? What characterizes its expression? Who benefits from and who is excluded from our favour? In this chapter, we tackle the long-standing anthropological puzzle of how to attend to manifestations of spontaneity, free will to act, and sympathy – that is, manifestations of favour. We argue that acts of favour constitute a significant ethical dimension of social life. We show how favours perform the intermediary and balancing work between incommensurable values, interests, obligations, and ethical sensibilities that underpin our lives. Favours can mediate, for example, between the calculative values of the market and those of friendship and kin relations, between the divine grace and performing good deeds; or in the situations of radical distress, when the question of life and death is at stake. Ultimately, if human sociality is grounded in the exchange of sentiments and gratitude mediated by the ethical labour of favours, then favours need to be considered as one of the key articulations of the ethical condition of social life.

This chapter introduces the most important terms of Hegel’s account of teleology, viz. ‘external purposiveness’ and ‘inner purposiveness’, which Hegel inherits from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement. Kant claims that our inclination to judge nature as analogous to the products of human art, and therefore as having ends as our actions have ends, is not properly justified from an objective standpoint. Consequently, the concept of a ‘natural end’ seems irremediably problematic for him. For Hegel, in contrast, the concept of an ‘objective end’ is an entirely appropriate concept, and, indeed, the concept of a true purpose, which we can apply similarly to both nature and spirit. Hegel sees himself as recasting and reviving Kant’s undertaking with the notion of ‘inner purposiveness’.

While readers have long recognized the innovative styles of Wittgenstein’s writings, this chapter considers the philosophical significance of the concept, perception, and attribution of style in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and other works. Contrary to some interpreters, I argue in the first section that the later Wittgenstein continued to see philosophy as logic, but expanded his conception of what constituted “the logical” to include “forms of life,” “life,” “living,” and so on. In the second section, I draw on recent work on the logical form of judgment about living organisms to describe distinctive logical features of such judgment including necessity, unity, generality and its relation to particularity, and temporality, and in the third section, I show that this logical form and its distinctive features can elucidate claims made about forms of life in Philosophical Investigations. In the final section, I show how Wittgenstein’s concept of style exhibits the same logical features and thereby serves as a guiding metaphor for recognizing “the logical” in our everyday life-activities.

This famous argument is important for understanding how, according to Socrates, we can inquire without the senses: the knowledge is already within us; the senses are merely necessary for triggering the beginning of inquiry. I argue that Socrates treats recollecting as an extended process. His claim is that learning is a type of recollecting that begins when we first perceive something and continues until we acquire knowledge of the relevant form. Moreover, I argue that Socrates is interested in a type of recollecting that involves perceiving one thing and bringing to mind another, which is the very standard by which one can judge the first. Socrates does not provide here an argument for accepting “Platonic forms,” where these are understood as including all of Plato’s central commitments about the forms. Instead, his argument highlights one key difference between ordinary objects and forms: that the latter do not change over time, whereas the former do.

A prominent theme in the mirror literature is the exceptionalism of the king’s position, a point often presented as the result of divine selection or favour. Many mirror-writers evoke, in various articulations, the notion of the divine mandate – the proposition that the king ruled by virtue of divine choice and with divine support. But the authors bring very different perspectives to this idea; even when they invoke a common repertoire of formulae and metaphors, they employ them to create different meanings. Several authors insist that the singular bounties that the king enjoys are counterbalanced by unparalleled, and burdensome, responsibilities. The texts in this chapter are drawn from Pseudo-Māwardī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; al-Thaʿālibī, Ādāb al-mulūk; al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; Ghazālī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; and al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk.

In this chapter, I set out Merleau-Ponty’s critique of intellectualism, which understands perception proper in terms of the top–down imposition of scientific and proto-scientific concepts on our sensory deliverances by way of judgements. Intellectualism begins with Descartes and is refined in parts of the B edition of Kants First Critique. The scientistic reading of Kant is propounded most notably by Léon Brunschvicg, one of Merleau-Ponty’s early teachers. I outline Merleau-Ponty’s critique, to the effect that intellectualism neglects pre-conceptual perception, motivated attention and action and our early and exploratory acts of learning. It also neglects the singularity of empirical things and of the somatically and cognitively constituting subject. I go on to show how Merleau-Ponty takes up ideas from Kant that are not tied to intellectualist suppositions, including the synoptic synthesis of apprehension, the schemas for pure and empirical concepts, orientation in space, the feeling of perceiving and the productive imagination.

A mediated settlement agreement must be enforceable for its obligations to be binding. Several elements can result in mediated settlements being set aside: the absence of contractual certainty to bind the disputing parties, rescission on account of an unjust factor, undue influence, duress and coercion, unconscionability, incompetence or incapacity, lack of authority, fraud and mistake. The jurisprudence resulting from attempts to evade mediated settlement agreements provides guidance to the mediator and the legal advisors to the parties on the practical steps that can be taken to provide certainty and avoid enforcement problems. Careful and comprehensive drafting incorporating all the intended commercial terms is critical to ensure that mediated settlement agreements are complete and enforceable. Where compliance may be an issue, the settlement can be converted into an arbitral award or a court judgment, or enforced under the Singapore Convention which elevates international mediated settlement agreements to a new status that can be recognised and enforced within the framework of private international law.

This chapter outlines how social media data, such as Facebook and Twitter, can be used to study language attitudes. This comparatively recent method in language attitudes research benefits from the immediate accessibility of large amounts of data from a wide range of people that can be collected quickly and with minimal effort – a point in common with attitude studies using print data. At the same time, this method collects people’s spontaneous thoughts, that is unprompted attitudinal data – a characteristic usually attributed to methods drawing on speech data. The study of language attitudes in social media data can, however, yield wholly different insights from writing and speech data. The chapter discusses the advantages and pitfalls of different types of content analysis as well as the general limitations of the method. The chapter presents an overview of software programmes to collect social media data, as well as geo-tagging, and addresses data analysis as well as the general usefulness of the method (e.g. its applicability around the world or the potential for diachronic attitudinal change). The case study in this chapter uses examples from Twitter, focusing on attitudes towards the Welsh accent in English.

The opening chapter looks at the role of judgement in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on the way in which the legislative function of the understanding is central to transcendental idealism. It shows how Kant associates determination with judgement, and how this association is maintained in Hölderlin and Schelling’s efforts to resolve certain aporias in the Kantian system, with being understood as indeterminate because it differs from the world of judgement. It concludes by showing how Hegel resolves difficulties presented by Hölderlin’s distinction between judgement and being by seeing judgement as an abstraction from a richer process of reason. As such, it demonstrates the centrality of judgement in the German Idealist tradition.

Chapter 4 develops Merleau-Ponty’s perspectival account of experience. It shows how Merleau-Ponty’s claim that perception has a different structure to what he calls ‘objective thought’ can be derived from his interpretation of Kant’s paradox of symmetrical objects. It looks at how this difference in structure leads to Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive accounts of perspectival depth and orientation in space, before returning to Kant to show how Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception as having a figure-background structure leads to substantial divergences from Kant’s account of the constitution of the object (in doing so, it reconstructs a sustained argument against Kant’s transcendental deduction from fragmentary comments throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work). It also shows that the model of determination developed by Merleau-Ponty, while relying on context, differs significantly from Hegel’s account of determination, and supplements deficiencies in Sartre’s account.

The Introduction sets out the key claims of the book, and provides an outline of its chapters. These claims are that the French tradition rejects understanding thinking and judging, that this leads to an ambivalent relationship with Hegel and a return to Kant, and that the French tradition develops a novel account of thinking, and a new model of sense.

Chapter 2 introduces Bergson’s claim that thinking has a processual character that distinguishes it from judging. It analyses Bergson’s claim in Time and Free Will that the structure of our mental lives is different in kind from the way we understand the external world. It shows how Bergson’s later work develops an account of the interrelations of durational thinking and judging. Drawing on Bergson’s early untranslated lectures on Kant, it shows how Bergson pinpoints a lacuna in Kant’s account of the imagination, and attempts to argue that it is only by understanding thinking as operating through a process of dissociation, rather than the synthetic association of Kant’s model of the imagination, that we can understand the emergence of a meaningful world.

Chapter 6 turns to Michel Foucault, looking at both his early archaeological work and his introduction of power in the later genealogical writings. It focuses on how his early work examines the rules which precede and make possible judgements. We will see that Foucault derives the term and method of archaeology from Kant’s own work, though Foucault develops his own non-juridical logic of it. It then shows how this attempt to understand thinking as different from judging carries on into Foucault’s later genealogical work with his notion of biopower as an attempt to provide an alternative model of power to what we find in the juridico-discursive model that he argues typifies traditional understandings of it.

The third chapter explores Sartre’s account of thinking, focusing on his relatively neglected early work on the imagination. It takes up Sartre’s largely unacknowledged debt to Bergson, showing that despite Sartre’s move to phenomenology, his account of the difference between imagining and perceiving relies on Bergson’s logic of multiplicities. It argues that this influence carries on into Being and Nothingness where Sartre’s account of the situation as the process that makes judgement possible relies on a pre-juridical moment that inverts Bergson’s account of free will while remaining true to the categories underlying it. It analyses Sartre’s account of why we falsely understand consciousness as juridical, which reworks Kant’s own arguments in the paralogisms before showing how his account of consciousness ultimately fails to provide the positive account of the constitution of a situation that he requires.

Our final chapter begins by returning to Hölderlin’s account of the relationship between being and judgement. It argues that central to Deleuze’s philosophy is the introduction of an account of determination that operates differently from the subject-predicate determination discovered in judgement. The chapter draws on Chapter 4’s account of depth to show how Deleuze takes up and then expands Merleau-Ponty’s account of our perspectival relationship to the world. It further develops Kant’s notions of transcendental illusion to show why we tend to misunderstand the nature of thinking and the transcendental ideas to illuminate Deleuze’s account of how thinking produces sense prior to the introduction of judging.