Epistemic contextualists think that the truth-conditions of ‘knowledge’ ascriptions depend in part on the context in which they are uttered. But what features of context play a role in determining truth-conditions? The idea that the making salient of error-possibilities is a central part of the story has often been attributed to contextualists, and a number of contextualists seem to endorse it ...

Normative cognition – a uniquely human cognitive capacity ’Normative cognition’ is a ’mongrel’ concept covering human cognition of symbolically mediated normative information. Humans have social and cultural cognition of which normative cognition is a subset. Humans can produce, distribute, acquire and implement social norms and values. Normative cognition requires certain cognitive skills such...

We consider the relationship between positive and normative political theory, emphasising both the role of normative ideas in motivating political behaviour and particularly the constraints on normative theory imposed by positive theory. Our point of departure is Christiano’s recent claim that the rational choice approach to positive and normative political theory is self-defeating. In arguing ...

In this paper, the role of normative reputation in reducing the costs of complying with norms will be explored. In previous simulations (Conte & Castelfranchi 1995), in contrast to a traditional view of norms as means for increasing co-ordination among agents, the effects of normative and non-normative strategies in the control of aggression among agents in a common environment was confronted. ...