This chapter explores a number of ways to understand the key notions of the plurality thesis. First, I disambiguate three readings of the term logic: (i) purely formal systems, (ii) interpreted logical theories, and (iii) the subject matter of logical theories. I argue that this distinction is relatively lightweight and should be acceptable on all prominent views about the nature of logical consequence. Building on those readings of logic, I then explore different conceptions of what it means for a logic to be correct. In particular, I present a generic view of correctness of logical theories which is broad enough not to exclude pluralists who claim that the plurality thesis should better be put in terms of the legitimacy or the usefulness of a logic. I propose different ways to strengthen the generic view by means of a weak or a strong version of the correspondence view or the logic-as-modeling view. Finally, I introduce different implementations of the plurality thesis resulting from the different readings of logic and of correctness and identify the interesting version of the thesis which will be the subject of the rest of the book.

In previous chapters, I construed logical pluralism as the view that there are multiple correct theories of extra-systematic logical consequence. Against this background, it may be tempting to think that logical pluralists are committed to the postulation of a plurality of extra-systematic logical consequence relations. In this chapter I argue that further options are available. I first show that, depending on the underlying notion of correctness, logical pluralism is compatible with any account of the cardinality of extra-systematic logical consequence. I then identify readings of the plurality thesis that give rise to the revisionist reading of logical pluralism that is the target of this book. The most obvious one is genuine plurality—the view that there is more than one extra-systematic consequence relation. A less obvious one acknowledges monism about extra-systematic consequence but argues that there cannot be a single precise theory that captures this relation. I propose a monist approach to logic in both the theory sense and the subject of investigation sense that rejects revisionist logical pluralism.

Coherence is a highly valued notion in law and it is especially sought after in investor-state dispute settlement. At the same time, coherence is a largely underexplored concept in international law literature. The introductory chapter serves to set the stage for the book’s investigation. To that end, the chapter outlines: (i) the impetus behind the choice of coherence as a subject for inquiry; (ii) the principal, so-called ‘bottom-up’ perspective from which the subject of coherence is examined in the book; and (iii) the core thesis advanced in relation to the dual, substantive and methodological, nature of coherence and its role in judicial reasoning in investor-state dispute settlement.

The question with which this chapter grapples is the following: What kind of a concept is coherence and what is its content? The chapter begins by a general introduction on concepts. Three different concept types are identified: criterial concepts, natural-kind concepts, and interpretative concepts. As coherence is clearly not a natural-kind concept, the chapter analyses coherence as a potential candidate concept of the criterial kind. It identifies three elements often associated with, and deemed necessary for, the existence of coherence in a legal setting, namely: consistency, correctness, and comprehensiveness. Incidentally, these are also key concerns regarding the existing ISDS regime as expressed by state delegations and scholars. The section ultimately concludes that none of the three elements is necessary for coherence to exist in non-ideal practical situations. Based on this examination, the chapter then shifts perspectives and characterises coherence as a concept of the interpretative kind. In so doing, the chapter makes a preliminary case for the existence of a dual, substantive and methodological, dimension of the interpretative concept of coherence

Feelings are conscious states evoked by situations and, presumably, experienced by all animals. Most of us judge the feelings of young children and other animals as sufficiently similar to our own that we attribute or ascribe feelings, understandings, and beliefs to them. Clearly, the ascription of mental states, a verbal practice, depends on the availability of concepts. The question is whether the states themselves depend on such a verbal practice. I have suggested that they do. Those concepts, represented as the senses of the word “understanding,” go beyond feelings to include both correctness (Chapter 5) and intersubjectivity (Chapter 6). Thus, the relationship between subjective feeling and the concepts representing those feelings may be compared in terms of their “identity conditions,” that is, the features that distinguish them that came to light in the discussion of the views of Taylor and Nussbaum and Jackendoff (2012).

In Chapter 4, I suggested that young children may experience a feeling of understanding, namely that something makes sense, before they acquire a concept of understanding. However, that subjective feeling may not meet an appropriate level of truth or correctness. Young children may feel they understand, when in fact they misunderstand. Adults recognize the possibility of misunderstanding. Thus, one of the identity conditions for understanding is that of truth or correctness.

Critics have raised concerns that investment arbitration tribunals treat like cases differently – raising problems of consistency – and different cases the same – creating problems of correctness. Using network analyses of case citations, this chapter examines an observable selection of what a tribunal considers to be ‘relevant’ precedent. The author finds that tribunals are more concerned with consistency than correctness, with many tribunals citing precedents based on textually dissimilar treaties. However, this is contrary to what states consider the priority in ISDS reform debates – in which correctness is higher than consistency in the hierarchy of policy preferences. The chapter concludes that states can resolve that mismatch by hard-coding their policy preferences into institutional design. It is argued that, as part of the ISDS reform, states should make the ordering between correctness and consistency considerations explicit when reshaping adjudicatory authority in future ISDS institutions.

From his earliest poetry, Heaney used formal linguistic terminology to describe his poetic practice. After Seeing Things, from the point when he developed a stress on the visionary, his linguistic analysis increasingly dwelt on the process by which instinctive observation of objects and experiences underlies language: what he called ‘raids on the prearticulate’. Earlier poems like ‘Alphabets’ described this as a process of education; later poems reverse the process so that existing language is taken back to the unarticulated sentiments and physical realities that underlie it. For Heaney the great image for this is Braille by which material figures work backwards by sensory exploration to the things they represent. He uses it as an image from ‘Bog Queen’ in North to 'At the Wellhead' in Seeing Things.

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.