Among Quine’s main concerns in his “On What There Is”, there was that of solving a problem of expressibility for ontological denials. His proposed solution to such a problem was, in a purely Carnapian vein, a shift of attention to the semantic features of ontological claims – what Quine called the strategy of “semantic ascent”. Quine’s relevant assumption is that talk about language is much les...

Electronic contracting, mostly through software agents, led to an impressive growth in electronic transactions, but also in the number of disputes arising out of these transactions. Paper-based courts are however unable to efficiently deal with this increase in disputes. On the other hand, current Online Dispute Resolution methodologies are impersonal and cold, leaving aside important informati...

While the term sports law has been used as a catch-all phrase to describe the increasing number of sports-related disputes being submitted to the courts for resolution, no substantive defmition of this phenomenon has been forthcoming. This paper suggests categorical parameters for the field through a descriptive case analysis of four types of sports disputes frequently litigated: traditional ne...

In everyday disputes, and especially political disputes, people often use analogical arguments to support their views. For example, many of the arguments about the War in Iraq were regularly bolstered by analogical comparisons to WWII and Vietnam. Though logic and philosophy has always viewed analogical argumentation as suspect, analogical thinking has recently been studied and modelled extensi...

The role intermediaries play in resolving land-taking disputes in socialist Asia has rarely been studied, but this inquiry is critical to understanding alternatives to courtbased dispute resolution. This paper explores how intermediaries, such as retired state officials, navigate in and around authoritarian regimes to resolve complex disputes that pit citizens against the state. Empirical studi...

Software development contracts often lead to disputes between the software service supplier and the client commissioning the development. A chief cause of the disputes is the cost of the software development exceeding initial estimates. Software development pricing is based on a ‘fee per unit’ basis. This paper examines 3 key ‘fee per unit’ pricing approaches Time and Materials, Fixed Price for...

The current framework of Internet interconnections, based on transit and settlement-free peering relations, has systemic problems that often cause peering disputes. We propose a new techno-economic interconnection framework called Nash-Peering, which is based on the principles of Nash Bargaining in game theory and economics. Nash-Peering constitutes a radical departure from current interconnect...

As security protocols are used to authenticate more transactions, they end up being relied on in legal proceedings. Designers often fail to anticipate this. Here we show how the EMV protocol – the dominant card payment system worldwide – does not produce adequate evidence for resolving disputes. We propose five principles for designing systems to produce robust evidence. We apply these to other...

This paper aims at explicating the hegemonic pressure from the U.S. side and the constant resistance from the Chinese side during the U.S.-China IPR disputes in the cyberspace. The theory of hegemony and extended literature review reveal that during the U.S.-China IPR disputes in cyberspace, the dominant U.S. power has shaped the IPR world order so effectively for its own interests that China a...

One of the most pervasive concepts in human interactions is social power since many social situations entail disputes of social power. These disputes are power games and range from simple personal reasoning to the exercise of specific power strategies, which enhance or assert one’s power. Recognizing the importance of such interactions and how they can enhance autonomous agents’ socially intell...