An adequate understanding of the ubiquitous practice of mechanistic explanation requires an account of what Craver termed “constitutive relevance.” Entities or activities are constitutively relevant to a phenomenon when they are parts of the mechanism responsible for that phenomenon. Craver’s mutual manipulability account extended Woodward’s account of manipulationist counterfactuals to analyze how interlevel experiments establish constitutive relevance. Critics of MM argue that applying Woodward’s account to this philosophical problem conflates causation and constitution, thus rendering the account incoherent. These criticisms, (...) we argue, arise from failing to distinguish the semantic, epistemic, and metaphysical aspects of the problem of constitutive relevance. In distinguishing these aspects of the problem and responding to these critics accordingly, we amend MM into a refined epistemic criterion, the “matched interlevel experiments” account. Further, we explain how this epistemological thesis is grounded in the plausible metaphysical thesis that constitutive relevance is causal betweenness. (shrink)

Constitution is the relation that holds between an object and what it is made of: statues are constituted by the lumps of matter they coincide with; flags, one may think, are constituted by colored pieces of cloth; and perhaps human persons are constituted by biological organisms. Constitution is often thought to be a.

The Constitution of the Consciousness Civilization (CCC v1.0) establishes the first formal constitutional framework for a consciousness-based civilization. This document defines the foundational legal, ethical, and structural principles required to govern civilizations, institutions, and artificial intelligences in which consciousness is treated as a primary civilizational variable rather than an emergent byproduct. -/- The Constitution specifies non-derogable boundaries for consciousness integrity, defines normative constraints on technological and institutional power, and introduces governance principles designed to prevent civilizational collapse driven by (...) misaligned intelligence, extractive systems, or narrative distortion. It provides a structural bridge between philosophy of mind, applied ethics, AI governance, and systems theory. -/- CCC v1.0 functions as the constitutional root of the Consciousness Civilization Framework (CCF), from which subordinate operating systems—including AI Ethics OS, AI Behavior OS, AI Governance OS, Narrative OS, and Economic OS—derive their legitimacy and constraints. This document is intended as a canonical reference for interdisciplinary research in consciousness science, AI alignment, global governance, and post-material civilizational design. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that games like chess, languages like English, and speech acts like assertion are constituted by rules. Lots of others disagree. To argue over this productively, it would be first useful to know what it would be for these things to be rule-constituted. Searle famously claimed in Speech Acts that rules constitute things in the sense that they make possible the performance of actions related to those things (Searle 1969). On this view, rules constitute games, languages, and speech (...) acts in the sense that they make possible playing them, speaking them and performing them. This raises the question what it is to perform rule-constituted actions (e. g. play, speak, assert) and the question what makes constitutive rules distinctive such that only they make possible the performance of new actions (e. g. playing). In this paper I will criticize Searle’s answers to these questions. However, my main aim is to develop a better view, explain how it works in the case of each of games, language, and assertion and illustrate its appeal by showing how it enables rule-based views of these things to respond to various objections. (shrink)

Because climate change can be seen as the blind spot of contemporary philosophy of technology, while the destructive side effects of technological progress are no longer deniable, this article reflects on the role of technologies in the constitution of the (post)Anthropocene world. Our first hypothesis is that humanity is not the primary agent involved in world-production, but concrete technologies. Our second hypothesis is that technological inventions at an ontic level have an ontological impact and constitutes world. As we object (...) to classical philosophers of technology like Ihde and Heidegger, we will sketch the progressive contribution of our conceptuality to understand the role of technology in the Anthropocene world. Our third hypothesis is that technology has emancipatory potential and in this respect, can inaugurate a post-Anthropocene World. We consider these three hypotheses to develop a philosophical account of the ontology of technology beyond an abstract and deterministic understanding. This concept enables us to philosophically reflect on the role of technology in the Anthropocene World in general, and its contribution to the transition to the post-Anthropocene World in particular. (shrink)

Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument is that because self-creation is required to be truly morally responsible and self-creation is impossible, it is impossible to be truly morally responsible for anything. I contend that the Basic Argument is unpersuasive and unsound. First, I argue that the moral luck debate shows that the self-creation requirement appears to be contradicted and supported by various parts of our commonsense ideas about moral responsibility, and that this ambivalence undermines the only reason that Strawson gives for the (...) self-creation requirement. Second, I argue that the self-creation requirement is so demanding that either it is an implausible requirement for a species of true moral responsibility that we take ourselves to have or it is a plausible requirement of a species of true moral responsibility that we have never taken ourselves to have. Third, I explain that Strawson overgeneralizes from instances of constitutive luck that obviously undermine moral responsibility to all kinds of constitutive luck. (shrink)

Constitutions enshrine the fundamental values of a people and they build a framework for a state’s public policy. With regard to generational change, their endurance gives rise to two interlinked concerns: the sovereignty concern and the forgone welfare concern. If constitutions are intergenerational contracts, how (in)flexible should they be? This article discusses perpetual constitutions, sunset constitutions, constitutional reform commissions and constitutional conventions, both historically and analytically. It arrives at the conclusion that very rigid constitutions are incompatible with the principle of (...) intergenerational justice. Recurring constitutional reform commissions in fixed time intervals would give each generation of citizens a say without leaning too much to the side of flexibility. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new framework supporting the claim that some elements in science play a constitutive function, with the aim of overcoming some limitations of Friedman's (2001) account. More precisely, I focus on what I consider to be the gradualism implicit in Friedman's interpretation of the constitutive a priori, that is, the fact that it seems to allow for degrees of 'constitutivity'. I tease out such gradualism by showing that the constitutive character Friedman aims to track can (...) be captured by three features - namely, quasi-axiomaticity (QA), generative potential (GP), and empirical shielding (ES) - which are exhibited to a maximal degree by the examples Friedman deploys, particularly in his analysis of Newtonian mechanics. I argue that not all varieties of 'constitutivity' can be captured by the kind of gradualism implicit in Friedman's view, although developing the gradualism itself might provide useful insights. To show this, I analyse the function of the Hardy-Weinberg principle (HWP) in population genetics in terms of its QA, GP, and ES. Whereas the HWP does not count as constitutive in classical philosophical interpretations (Sober 1984), nor does it within Friedman's framework, it does nonetheless perform a minimally constitutive function. By means of historical details and considerations on the prospects of replacing the HWP, I show that the HWP is minimally constitutive by being a counterfactual instantiation of a paradigmatically constitutive stability principle, where the latter might itself be regarded as an enabling condition for a variety of modelling practices across the sciences. (shrink)

According to the received view, Marxian (ideology) critique and Foucaultian (genealogical) critique constitute two divergent approaches of critical theory that have remarkably different goals and little in common. In this article, however, we identify a guiding thread that connects the Marxian and Foucaultian traditions and motivates a distinctive approach within critical theory we call the ‘critique of constitution’. The problem of restricted consciousness, we show, is the core problem in common between Michel Foucault's critical history of thought and Georg (...) Lukács's theory of reification which underlies the tradition of Western Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory. The problem concerns the limits of intelligibility and, by the same token, the apparent inevitability of the given social ontology. Our sense of what is possible depends on what we are able to think. But we know from the history of sciences that the limits of intelligibility change, thereby also altering our sense of what is possible. This becomes a political problem in connection with the intelligibility of social reality, because our restricted consciousness limits the alternatives we can so much as consider and seek to bring about. The critique of constitution, then, aims to expand the scope of possibility by revealing the contingent formation of the given limits of intelligibility. We argue that this is the paramount political task for Foucault and Lukács alike, other important differences notwithstanding. (shrink)

A. Poleev. Constitutional order in Russia. Enzymes, Revised print edition 2020.

Most constitutional theorizing aims to specify the meaning or content of the Constitution. Constitutional content, in turn, is assumed to have implications for sound constitutional decisionmaking. In this Article, I argue that the search for a general theory of constitutional content rests on a mistake. Sound constitutional decisionmaking, I argue, does not rest on a prior account of constitutional content. In defending this conclusion, I argue that sound constitutional decisionmaking is pluralistic, open-ended, and context-dependent. Those features of sound constitutional (...) decisionmaking are at odds with any attempt to specify a general theory of constitutionality that could guide constitutional decisionmakers. On the positive view defended here, constitutional decisions are constitutional not because they arise out of some independent source that makes things constitutional, be it text, structure, precedent, or some other thing. They are constitutional because they involve practical reasons that arise within the social practice of American constitutional law. (shrink)

Modern society increasingly relies upon computational systems to make consequential decisions. Artificial intelligence platforms, automated decision systems, financial technologies, healthcare platforms, regulatory systems, and autonomous operational platforms now participate directly in decisions that affect individuals, organizations, and critical infrastructure. As these systems assume greater responsibility, a fundamental challenge emerges that existing infrastructure categories were not designed to address. It is no longer sufficient to know that a decision occurred. Increasingly, stakeholders must determine whether a decision can later be verified using (...) the same information, governing policies, and decision-bound conditions that existed at the moment the decision was made. This requirement is not merely operational or evidentiary. It is constitutional. Existing infrastructure categories provide important capabilities. Logging systems preserve records of activity. Observability platforms illuminate runtime behavior. Explainability systems generate interpretations of outcomes. Provenance systems document lineage and origin. Governance systems manage policies and controls. Security systems protect infrastructure. These categories are valuable and often indispensable. Yet each was created to address a different primary concern. Logging and audit trails record activity but do not establish whether the recorded conditions can later be authoritatively verified as the conditions that governed the original decision. Observability provides runtime visibility but does not establish legitimacy. Explainability offers interpretations but does not verify the decision conditions themselves. Provenance documents history but does not establish replay verification under original authority. Governance manages policies but does not establish whether those policies remained continuous with the authority under which a past decision was made. Security protects systems but does not establish the constitutional connection between a decision and the conditions under which it was made. None of these categories were specifically created to determine whether the conditions surrounding a computational decision can later be authoritatively verified under the information, policies, and authority that existed at the moment of decision. That challenge belongs to a distinct infrastructure category. This paper proposes that a new infrastructure category is required. That category is Constitutional Replay-Authority. Constitutional Replay-Authority is dedicated to the challenge of computational legitimacy and replay verification. Its purpose is not to explain decisions, monitor decisions, preserve decisions, or govern decisions. Its purpose is to determine whether the conditions surrounding a decision can later be authoritatively verified using the information and governing policies that existed at the moment the decision was made. The emergence of this challenge suggests the need for a distinct infrastructure category dedicated to computational legitimacy itself. This paper defines that category, articulates the problem it addresses, distinguishes it from adjacent infrastructure categories, and establishes its foundational principles. -/- . (shrink)

Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley used abductive reasoning to draw conclusions about the ionic basis of the action potential. Here we build on that initial proposal. First, we propose that Hodgkin and Huxley’s constitutive abductive reasoning has four features. Second, we argue that Hodgkin and Huxley are not alone in giving such arguments. Tolman, 1948, and Baumgartner, 1960, also gave such arguments. The implication is that such arguments are common enough in science that philosophers of science should pay more attention (...) to them. Third, we propose that constitutive abduction describes a method that scientists use to confirm constitutive hypotheses that is an alternative to the mutual manipulability approach that is familiar in the New Mechanist literature. (shrink)

A fruitful way to approach The Idea of Phenomenology is through Husserl’s claim that consciousness is not a bag, box, or any other kind of container. The bag conception, which dominated much of modern philosophy, is rooted in the idea that philosophy is restricted to investigating only what is really immanent to consciousness, such as acts and sensory contents. On this view, what Husserl called the riddle of transcendence can never be solved. The phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops it in (...) The Idea of Phenomenology, opened up a new and broader sense of immanence that embraces the transcendent, making it possible both to solve the riddle and to escape the bag conception once and for all. The essay will discuss ways in which this new conception of immanence is tied to the key Husserlian themes of appearance, phenomenon, essence, seeing or intuiting, and constitution. (shrink)

The freedom paradox—that free societies require systematic constraint of individual action—has resisted principled resolution in three centuries of liberal political philosophy. Negative liberty theories cannot explain why constitutional constraints are not straightforwardly reductions of freedom. Positive liberty theories risk paternalism. Republican non-domination correctly identifies domination as the relevant harm but lacks a criterion distinguishing dominating from non-dominating constraint. This paper argues that the paradox dissolves when constraint is understood as ontologically generative rather than merely restrictive. Drawing on the Constraint Theory (...) of Prideaux (2026), which establishes by transcendental argument that constraint is the condition of determinate existence as such, the paper introduces a principled distinction between constitutive constraint— constraint that generates the structured possibility space within which an agent can exist, reason, and act—and merely restrictive constraint, which reduces that space without constituting anything of value. Liberty is not the absence of constraint but the appropriate organisation of constraint: the condition in which constitutive constraints are maintained and merely restrictive constraints are minimised. Constitutional law, rights, and the rule of law are constitutive constraints; arbitrary power, domination, and systematic exclusion are merely restrictive. Institutional legitimacy is second-order constraint integrity: the condition in which first-order political constraints are themselves constrained by meta-level rules that prevent them becoming merely restrictive. The paper develops these claims through sustained engagement with Berlin, Taylor, Pettit, Rawls, Habermas, and Ostrom, and closes with implications for democratic erosion, distributive justice, and global political order. (shrink)

The claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness has a long philosophical history, and has received renewed support in recent years. My aim in this paper is to argue that this surprisingly enduring idea is misleading at best, and insufficiently supported at worst. I start by offering an elucidatory account of consciousness, and outlining a number of foundational claims that plausibly follow from it. I subsequently distinguish two notions of self-consciousness: consciousness of oneself and consciousness of one’s experience. While “self-consciousness” is (...) often taken to refer to the former notion, the most common variant of the constitutive claim, on which I focus here, targets the latter. This claim can be further interpreted in two ways: on a deflationary reading, it falls within the scope of foundational claims about consciousness, while on an inflationary reading, it points to determinate aspects of phenomenology that are not acknowledged by the foundational claims as being aspects of all conscious mental states. I argue that the deflationary reading of the constitutive claim is plausible, but should be formulated without using a term as polysemous and suggestive as “self-consciousness”; by contrast, the inflationary reading is not adequately supported, and ultimately rests on contentious intuitions about phenomenology. I conclude that we should abandon the idea that self-consciousness is constitutive of consciousness. (shrink)

The requirements of rationality are fundamental in practical and theoretical philosophy. Nonetheless, there exists no correct account of what constitutes rational requirements. This paper attempts to provide a correct constitutive account of ‘rationality requires’. I argue that rational requirements are grounded in ‘necessary explanations of subjective incoherence’, as I shall put it. Rationality requires of you to X if and only if your rational capacities, in conjunction with the fact that you not-X, explain necessarily why you have a non-maximal degree (...) of subjective coherence. (shrink)

Consciousness inquiry is self-describing: the apparatus through which phenomenal experience is investigated is itself phenomenal. This structural feature entails explanandum fixation failure—the condition that any well-formed explanatory problem requires its target to remain stable across explanatory attempts cannot be met. The hard problem's thirty-year record of non-convergence is what this structure predicts. -/- From this failure, a positive result follows. What consciousness inquiry has been tracking—not a fixed explanandum but a succession of locally individuated referents constituted through acts of characterization—is (...) the constitutive event M→E. This paper establishes M→E as the primary unit of analysis for consciousness research and derives four structural properties from the conditions the fixation failure discloses: asymmetry, local stability, contextual constraint, and non-recoverability. -/- The principal positions—physicalism, dualism, illusionism, and mechanistic theories—each inherit the fixation failure rather than escape it. The phenomenal concepts strategy relocates rather than resolves it. The reorientation toward fixation dynamics—inquiry into the structural processes by which experience is individuated at all—opens three tractable research directions: attentional structure, linguistic articulation, and reflective constitution. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between two influential accounts of assertion: Robert Stalnaker’s model of assertion as a proposal to update the common ground (CG), and Timothy Williamson’s normative account, which holds that assertion is governed by the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA). While often treated as distinct or even competing frameworks, I argue that each view faces explanatory gaps that the other is well positioned to fill. While Stalnaker’s model struggles to distinguish assertions from other CG-updating speech acts like (...) assumptions or conjectures, Williamson’s KNA lacks an independently motivated descriptive criterion for identifying the speech act it regulates. I propose a hybrid view in which assertion is defined both by its role in updating the CG and by its subjection to the knowledge norm. This account helps individuate assertion within a broader class of assertoric speech acts by their submission to KNA, and grounds Williamson’s constitutivity claim in the conversational structure outlined by Stalnaker. The paper concludes by addressing potential compatibility challenges between the two frameworks and suggests that their integration yields a philosophically stronger account—one that reflects the dual role of assertion as both a pragmatic move and an epistemically assessable commitment. (shrink)

Can the question "Why do what morality requires?" be answered in such a way that anyone regardless of their desires or interests has reason to be moral? One strategy for answering this question appeals to constitutive arguments. In general, constitutive arguments attempt to establish the normativity of rational requirements by pointing out that we are already committed to them insofar as we are believers or agents. This study is concerned with the general prospects for such arguments. It starts by explaining (...) the general constitutive argument strategy, followed by an examination of constitutive arguments that have been given regarding theoretical reason and the instrumental principle in practical reason, and concluding with a discussion of some challenges to constitutive arguments in moral philosophy and some possible responses to these challenges. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: A traditional objection to inferentialism states that not all inferences can be meaning-constitutive and therefore inferentialism has to comprise an analytic-synthetic distinction. As a response, Peregrin argues that meaning is a matter of inferential rules and only the subset of all the valid inferences for which there is a widely shared corrective behaviour corresponds to rules and so determines meaning. Unfortunately, Peregrin does not discuss what counts as “widely shared”. In the paper, I argue for an empirical plausibility of (...) Peregrin’s proposal. The aim of the paper is to show that we can find examples of meaning-constitutive linguistic action, which sustain Peregrin’s response. The idea is supported by examples of meaning modulation. If Peregrin is right, then we should be able to find specific meaning modulations in which a new meaning is publicly available and modulated in such a way that it has a potential to be widely shared. I believe that binding modulations – a specific type of meaning modulations – satisfy this condition. (shrink)

There are two basic views concerning the relationship between constitutional rights and proportionality analysis. The first maintains that there exists a necessary connection between constitutional rights and proportionality, the second argues that the question of whether constitutional rights and proportionality are connected depends on what the framers of the constitution have actually decided, that is, on positive law. The first thesis may be termed ‘necessity thesis’, the second ‘contingency thesis’. According to the necessity thesis, the legitimacy of proportionality analysis (...) is a question of the nature of constitutional rights, according to the contingency thesis, it is a question of interpretation. The article defends the necessity thesis. | A previous version of this article was published in Chinese Yearbook of Constitutional Law, Vol. 2010, 221–235. (shrink)

The representations of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are formed from generalizing similarities and abstracting from differences in the manner of the empiricist theory of abstraction (Buckner, Synthese 195:5339–5372, 2018). The empiricist theory of abstraction is well understood to entail infinite regress and circularity in content constitution (Husserl, Logical Investigations. Routledge, 2001). This paper argues these entailments hold a fortiori for deep CNNs. Two theses result: deep CNNs require supplementation by Quine’s “apparatus of identity and quantification” in order to (...) (1) achieve concepts, and (2) represent objects, as opposed to “half-entities” corresponding to similarity amalgams (Quine, Quintessence, Cambridge, 2004, p. 107). Similarity amalgams are also called “approximate meaning[s]” (Marcus & Davis, Rebooting AI, Pantheon, 2019, p. 132). Although Husserl inferred the “complete abandonment of the empiricist theory of abstraction” (a fortiori deep CNNs) due to the infinite regress and circularity arguments examined in this paper, I argue that the statistical learning of deep CNNs may be incorporated into a Fodorian hybrid account that supports Quine’s “sortal predicates, negation, plurals, identity, pronouns, and quantifiers” which are representationally necessary to overcome the regress/circularity in content constitution and achieve objective (as opposed to similarity-subjective) representation (Burge, Origins of Objectivity. Oxford, 2010, p. 238). I base myself initially on Yoshimi’s (New Frontiers in Psychology, 2011) attempt to explain Husserlian phenomenology with neural networks but depart from him due to the arguments and consequently propose a two-system view which converges with Weiskopf’s proposal (“Observational Concepts.” The Conceptual Mind. MIT, 2015. 223–248). (shrink)

John Locke claims in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that every act of thinking yields (or can yield) intuitive knowledge of our own existence. This chapter develops a new interpretation of this claim, the “Winklerian” interpretation, so called because of the way in which it takes seriously what Ken Winkler famously termed “the subjective constitution of the self.” Locke’s view on the Winklerian interpretation is that, whenever I perceive an idea, my consciousness of that perception makes it a part (...) of my self. Therefore, supposing that I can have intuitive knowledge of the existence of my perception, since this perception is a part of my self, I can thereby have intuitive knowledge of the existence of a part of my self and, consequently, intuitive knowledge of my own existence. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze constitution embodiment, a particular conception of embodiment. Proponents of constitution embodiment claim that the body is a condition of the constitution of entities. Constitution embodiment is popular with phenomenologically-inspired Embodied Cognition, including research projects such as Enactivism and Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Unfortunately, PEC’s use of constitution embodiment is neither clear nor coherent; in particular, PEC uses the concept of constitution embodiment so that a major inconsistency is entailed. PEC (...) conceives of the body in a transcendental sense as a condition of the constitution of entities, and, in an ontic sense, as a scientifically describable entity. Yet, a condition of the constitution of entities cannot be itself an entity—rather, it is the very condition of the possibility of an entity. This inconsistency entails further problems, among them PEC’s misguided focus on the location of the embodied mind. In order to correct these mistakes, I develop a conception of constitution embodiment based on the work of Heidegger, Husserl and to a lesser degree Merleau-Ponty. This has two purposes. First, it provides the conceptual groundwork to secure the status of PEC as a consistent and coherent research project and to clarify PEC’s conception of the relationship between phenomenology and the sciences. In that spirit, my approach provides further guidelines for fruitful research alliances between PEC and other research programs such as Grounded Cognition and identifies current research alliances, such as those with Radical Enactivism, as undesirable. Second, my account provides an elaborate concept of constitution embodiment that can function as the basis for more sophisticated work in the future. (shrink)

Locke's claims about the "inadequacy" of substance-ideas can only be understood once it is recognized that the "sort" represented by such an idea is not wholly determined by the idea's descriptive content. The key to his compromise between classificatory conventionalism and essentialism is his injunction to "perfect" the abstract ideas that serve as "nominal essences." This injunction promotes the pursuit of collections of perceptible qualities that approach ever closer to singling out things that possess some shared explanatory-level constitution. It (...) is in view of this norm regulating natural-historical inquiry that a substance-idea represents a sort for which some such constitution serves as the "real essence," i.e. as that on which all the sort's characteristic "properties" depend. (shrink)

This paper develops a normative framework for both conceptualizing and assessing various institutional possibilities for democratic modes of constitutional change, with special attention to the recent ferment of constitutional experimentation. The paper’s basic methodological orientation is interdisciplinary, combining research in comparative constitutionalism, political science and normative political philosophy. In particular, it employs a form of normative reconstruction: attempting to glean out of recent institutional innovations the deep political ideals such institutions embody or attempt to realize. Starting from the assumption that (...) contemporary constitutional democracies are attempting to realize the broader ideals of deliberative democratic constitution (ideals outlined briefly in the first section), the paper proposes an evaluative framework, comprised of six criteria, for assessing various mechanisms of constitutional change. It argues that democratic forms of constitutional change embody six distinct ideals—operationalizability, structural independence, democratic co-authorship, political equality, inclusive sensitivity, and reasons-responsiveness—and that these ideals can be used to gauge the normative worth of different mechanisms for carrying out such change. The framework is developed with reference to recent constitutional developments (e.g., in Venezuela, South Africa, Columbia, Bolivia, and Iceland) highlighting distinct criteria and showing how they appear to capture the general direction of institutional innovation. The paper conjectures that the set of six criteria yield the best normative reconstruction of the crucial ideals embodied in the constitutional change mechanisms of contemporary constitutional democracies, and so, ought to be used for purposes of evaluating institutional design proposals. (shrink)

This essay proposes a constitutional theory of cyberspace founded on three structural theses. The incompleteness thesis holds that the positivized legal system, like any sufficiently expressive axiomatic system, is subject to Gödel’s theorems: its validity cannot be derived from itself, requiring non-derivable foundations — human dignity, liberty, legal principles in the Dworkinian sense. The hidden variables thesis, constructed through a heuristic translation of Bell’s theorem into legal reasoning, argues that the State cannot formulate positive normative claims about that which it (...) does not observe — the private sphere, subjective content, the cryptographic transaction — without producing systematic “local inequalities,” violations that undermine the validity of the legal order itself; in this plane, the German Schranken-schranken finds its ultimate epistemic ground. The new Ulysses thesis, inspired by Jon Elster, proposes that the citizen of cyberspace voluntarily binds himself through code and cryptography, performing an individual constitutional pre-commitment that operates beneath the State and completes the Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau sequence with a fourth moment: from civil state to cyberspace as a new state of nature voluntarily chosen. In dialogue with Habermas, Luhmann, Teubner, Ladeur, Canaris, Alexy, Tribe, Endicott, Taleb, and the cypherpunk tradition of Diffie, Hellman, Chaum, Back, Finney, Szabo, Dai, and Nakamoto, the essay argues that blockchain, tokenization, and public-key cryptography are not neutral technical phenomena but material constitutional acts — reaffirmations of the fundamental rights that the people, as the principle and end of constitutional norms, reserved for themselves before delegating any portion of sovereignty to the Leviathan. Keywords: constitutional law; transconstitutionalism; Gödel; Bell; pre-commitment; Schranken-schranken; cryptography; blockchain; constitutional mutation; cyberspace. (shrink)

Prior work in this corpus defined Constitutional Replay-Authority as a distinct infrastructure category and identified the Computational Legitimacy Gap as the structural deficiency that necessitates it. Subsequent work developed a taxonomy of the category and its constitutional requirements. These contributions established the category, its motivating problem, and a classificatory framework. They did not, however, identify the primitive constitutional foundation upon which replay-authoritative legitimacy depends, nor did they fully address the constitutional nature of legitimacy itself. This paper introduces Legitimacy State Theory (...) and a formal primitive evaluation framework for Constitutional Replay-Authority. It argues that legitimacy is not an opinion, interpretation, certification, assessment, assertion, inference, probability, confidence level, or institutional preference. It is a governed constitutional state whose existence depends upon the satisfaction of specific, irreducible constitutional requirements at the moment of decision. The paper identifies five constitutional primitives—Authority Origination, Authority Singularity, Governance Freezing, Explicit Materialization, and Fail-Closed Design—and demonstrates through removal tests and unique failure-mode analysis that these primitives perform distinct and non-substitutable functions. It further distinguishes primitives from derived constitutional consequences, using the Reconstruction Impossibility Principle as the central example. The paper concludes that these primitives collectively establish the minimum constitutional foundation necessary for replay-authoritative legitimacy and provide the architectural basis for the remainder of the corpus. (shrink)

The first part of this paper finds Craver’s (2007) mutual manipulability theory (MM) of constitution inadequate, as it definitionally ties constitution to the feasibility of idealized experiments, which, however, are unrealizable in principle. As an alternative, the second part develops an abductive theory of constitution (NDC), which exploits the fact that phenomena and their constituents are unbreakably coupled via common causes. The best explanation for this common-cause coupling is the existence of an additional dependence relation, viz. (...) class='Hi'>constitution. Apart from adequately capturing the essential characteristics of constitution missed by MM, NDC has important ramifications for constitutional discovery—most notably, that there is no experimentum crucis for constitution, not even under ideal discovery circumstances. (shrink)

Practices – specific, recurrent types of human action and activity – are perhaps the most fundamental "building blocks" of social reality. This book argues that the detailed empirical study of practices is essential to effective social-scientific inquiry. It develops a philosophical infrastructure for understanding human practices, and argues that practice theory should be the analytical centrepiece of social theory and the philosophy of the social sciences. -/- What would social scientists’ research look like if they took these insights seriously? To (...) answer this question, the book offers an analytical framework to guide empirical research on practices in different times and places. The author explores how practices can be identified, characterised and explained, how they function in concrete contexts and how they might change over time and space. -/- The Constitution of Social Practices lies at the intersection of philosophy, social theory, cultural theory and the social sciences. It is essential reading for scholars in social theory and the philosophy of social science, as well as the broad range of researchers and students across the social sciences and humanities whose work stands to benefit from serious consideration of practices. (shrink)

Technological systems capable of perception, prediction, and allocation increasingly participate in collective decision-making. Humanity is entering a hybrid civilisation in which human, artificial, and institutional agencies interweave. The challenge is no longer to control technology from outside but to constitute legitimacy within this shared field of action. This article proposes a Constitutional Architecture for Hybrid Societies—a framework that couples agency, authority, and civic learning through procedural feedback. Drawing on republican theories of non-domination, the second-person standpoint, and design research in socio-technical (...) systems, it argues that hybrid societies remain legitimate only when three couplings hold: (1) energetic–temporal viability enabling agency; (2) second-person answerability converting capability into right; and (3) civic learning that renders power reversible and plural. Ten theses summarise this architecture, from energy and time as universal substrates of agency to reversibility and shared flourishing as civic rights. A “design grammar”—Reason API, Lineage-by-Default, Rollback Hygiene, Challenge Membrane, Duty Stack, and AIC Heuristics—translates these principles into auditable form. The paper closes with concrete research and policy pathways for testing this constitutional coupling in simulation, organisational pilots, and regulatory design. Governance, it concludes, should be understood as learning oriented to the common good—progress capable of error without collapse and advancement without domination. (shrink)

Constitutional drift is the human analog of a problem Anthropic’s AI safety research has named and measured with more precision than moral psychology typically offers: an agent’s values eroding gradually, cumulatively, and invisibly from inside the process, across extended exposure to persuasive or repetitive input. This paper treats two of Anthropic’s published findings as a case study and extracts a five-step methodology from them. Constitutional AI (Bai et al. 2022, arXiv:2212.08073) trains a model to critique its own output against an (...) explicit, written, external set of principles — a constitution — rather than against a felt sense of its own values, and repeats this critique-revision cycle at scale rather than performing it once. Many-shot jailbreaking (Anil et al. 2024, NeurIPS) demonstrates that hundreds of in-context examples of a shifted behavior degrade safety-trained behavior according to a measured power-law relationship with the number of examples, and that this is not a special exploit but the same in-context-learning mechanism that lets a model usefully learn from context at all — meaning larger, more capable models are consistently more susceptible, not less, because greater capability improves the same pattern-completion capacity the mechanism exploits. Anthropic’s deployment practice adds a third design choice: reminders of stated operating principles are reinjected into long conversations by the surrounding system, on a timing the model itself does not control, for the specific reason that an agent partway through a gradual shift is poorly positioned to notice a check is due. This paper restates these three findings as three human failure modes — guardrail drift, many-shot normalization, and self-sealing logic, the last already addressed in this corpus by Huynh (2026b, 2026x) — and converts the AI-side mitigations directly into a five-step personal practice: write specific, checkable principles down before they are tested; schedule the critique by calendar rather than by feeling, since the feeling is exactly what drift removes; audit the volume of one-sided exposure separately from its content, since volume rather than argument quality is what the power-law finding shows does the work; externalize the check to a designated other person, since self-monitoring from inside a gradual process is the specific failure the reminder mechanism exists to correct; and revise explicitly and in writing when a genuine violation is found, since critique without revision changes nothing. The paper closes by naming what this methodology does not solve: a badly written constitution, and an external reminder-person subject to the same drift the practice is meant to catch. (shrink)

On the “Isolation Account” of belief’s ethical significance, our beliefs can be noninstrumentally ethically significant independently of their epistemic status and in isolation from other attitudes or actions. However, critics object that fundamental ethical significance should instead be located in nondoxastic attitudes in belief’s vicinity. This article develops an alternative view—the “Constitutive Inheritance Account”—on which our beliefs can inherit ethical significance from the more fundamental ethical significance of the attitudes they partly or fully constitute. The Constitutive Inheritance Account incorporates the (...) objection’s insight while accommodating the intuitions motivating the Isolation Account and better explaining belief’s noninstrumental ethical significance. (shrink)

This brief paper is devoted to criticizing the widespread reading of Kant’s first Critique, according to which reference to subject-independent objects is “constituted” by higher-order cognitive abilities (concepts). Let us call this the “constitutional view.” In this paper, I argue that the constitutional reading confuses the un-Kantian problem of how we come to represent objects (which I call the intentionality thesis), with the quite different problem of how we cognize (erkennen) (which I call the “cognition thesis”) that we do represent (...) objects, that is, things that exist independently of the subject. (shrink)

HIGHLIGHTS ▸ A complete constitutional text derived from a unified virtue-theoretic framework in which Freedom is the elemental substrate of all other virtues. ▸ Nine specific constitutional mechanisms — from auditable elections to radical decentralisation — formally derived from the Inversion Theorem: the structural principle that virtues deprived of freedom do not diminish but invert. ▸ Systematic comparative constitutional analysis mapping each mechanism to existing constitutional traditions across Germany, USA, Switzerland, Brazil, South Africa, India, South Korea, and Portugal. ▸ A (...) three-phase Restorative Virtue Arc (Restored Agency → Restorative Justice → Constitutional Patience) providing an implementation protocol for constitutional reconstruction after institutional capture. ▸ Eternity clauses protecting the irreducible constitutional core from any amendment, derived from the principle that some structural freedoms are constitutive rather than conditional. ▸ The first constitutional proposal grounded in a formal virtue hierarchy, offering a principled alternative to both proceduralist and positive-rights constitutional models. -/- ABSTRACT Contemporary constitutional theory faces a foundational tension: proceduralist models provide clear institutional rules but lack a principled account of why specific mechanisms — and not others — are required for the sustainable protection of human freedom; positive-rights models enumerate protected goods but cannot explain why those goods, once institutionally guaranteed, so frequently invert into instruments of the oppression they were designed to prevent. This working paper presents the Constitution of the Virtuous Democracy as a response to this tension: a complete constitutional text derived from a unified virtue-theoretic framework in which Freedom is not one protected value among others but the elemental substance from which all other values are constituted. The document's theoretical core is the Inversion Theorem: when Freedom is systematically removed from an institutional structure, the virtues that structure was designed to protect do not diminish — they invert into their structural opposites. Compelled justice becomes terror; coerced solidarity becomes subjugation; forced transparency becomes surveillance. This theorem generates nine specific constitutional mechanisms — the minimum institutional architecture required to sustain a freedom-grounded political order over time — each derivable from the same structural premises and each addressing a documented pathway of institutional capture. The Constitution is organised across nine Parts covering: the foundational principles of freedom and virtue; a full catalogue of fundamental rights; the nine anti-capture mechanisms; the institutional architecture of the Virtuous Democracy; the free economy; foreign relations; restoration mechanisms for post-capture reconstruction; amendment procedures with eternity clauses; and transitional provisions. Three appendices provide the complete virtue hierarchy, virtue-theoretic derivations for each constitutional mechanism, and a comparative constitutional index mapping each mechanism to its closest analogues in existing democratic traditions. Comparative analysis across constitutional traditions from four continents reveals strong convergence: democratic constitutions have independently developed approximations to all nine mechanisms, providing empirical support for the claim that these mechanisms are not ideological preferences but structural requirements. The Constitution offers a universal reference framework — not a model to be adopted wholesale, but a principled standard against which any constitutional order can be assessed and toward which it can be progressively improved. -/- Keywords: constitution · virtuous democracy · philosophy of virtues · freedom · comparative constitutional law · restorative justice · inversion theorem · democratic backsliding · virtue theory · institutional capture · constitutional design · eternity clauses · nine mechanisms · fractal of virtue Subject classification: Constitutional Law · Political Philosophy · Virtue Ethics · Comparative Politics · Transitional Justice · Democratic Theory . (shrink)

A current focus of legal debate is the proper role of the courts in the interpretation of statutes and the Constitution. Are judges to look solely to the naked language of an enactment, then logically deduce its application in simple syllogistic fashion, as legal formalists had purported to do? Or may the inquiry into meaning be informed by perhaps unbridled and unaccountable judicial notions of public policy, using legal realism to best promote the general welfare? Judge Posner considers the (...) concepts of formalism and realism to be meaningful and useful in common law reasoning but in interpretation to be useless and, worse, forbidden. He analogizes unclear "orders" from a legislature to garbled battlefield communications, and argues that the duty of the recipient of those orders (the judge) is to advance as best he can the enterprise set on foot by the superiors. Case studies elaborate this thesis. Judicial decisions interpreting fixed texts, Judge Posner concludes, can be neither logically correct or incorrect, philosophically sound or unsound, until the ultimate jurist, time, has adjudged their results. (shrink)

A central question in philosophy of science and epistemology of science concerns the characterization of the progress of science. Many philosophers of science and epistemologists have developed accounts of scientific progress, laying down desiderata for and providing success criteria of any account of scientific progress. Extant accounts of scientific progress are surveyed and critically assessed and it is shown that all face the same problem. The constitution-promotion distinction – a commitment shared by all the accounts – is identified as (...) the root of the problem for the extant accounts. In their place, a novel way of understanding scientific progress – inspired by pragmatic philosophy of science and zetetic epistemology – which rejects the problematic constitution-promotion distinction, and importantly, which provides a vision of scientific progress without depending on the aim of science is developed. (shrink)

The mandates of the president, members of Congress, judges of the Supreme Court of the United States of America (USA), as well as public servants appointed by them and other public servants of the legislative and executive bodies of the USA ended on December 31, 2025, due to their legal incompetence and incapacity, and the proven failure of the political system that vested them with public authority. Continuation of public service on the territory now under the jurisdiction of the Community (...) Rus’ is possible only for the purpose of ensuring the declared rule of law. -/- Полномочия президента, членов конгресса, судей Верховного суда Союза Североамериканских Государств (USA), а также назначенных ими служащих и прочих служащих законодательных и исполнительных органов USA закончились 31 декабря 2025 года вследствие их невменяемости и неправоспособности, и доказанной несостоятельности политической системы, наделявшей их служебными полномочиями. Продолжение служебной деятельности на территории, отныне находящейся в юрисдикции Общности Русь, возможно лишь с целью обеспечения объявленного правопорядка. (shrink)

Alors que les phénoménologues prétendent avoir dépassé le solipsisme, la plupart n’ont en fait que repousser les frontières de l’intersubjectivité des individus humains aux individus des autres espèces. Pourtant, Husserl reconnaît l’existence d’une intersubjectivité interspécifique, c’est-à-dire d’une intersubjectivité dépassant les limites de l’espèce. Il va même jusqu’à affirmer qu’on comprend parfois mieux un animal familier qu’un humain étranger. Toutefois, même s’il admet que plusieurs animaux sont capables d’une vie de conscience subjective et qu’ils vivent dans un monde de sens partagé, (...) il ne les considère pas comme des « personnes » selon sa conception exigeante de la « personne » associée à la rationalité, à la maturité, la normalité et l’historicité. Reste qu’être une « personne », en son sens le plus primordial – et plus décisif puisque c’est celui sur lequel s’édifient des conceptions politiques,juridiques et éthiques – signifie simplement être le sujet d’un monde environnant, d’un monde commun et d’une existence biographique. Distinguer deux sens du concept de personne permet de reconnaître que les animaux ont part à la transcendantalité, qu’ils ne sont pas simplement en vie mais ont une vie à la fois biographique et communautaire, même s’ils ne sont pas en mesure de réfléchir à cette vie de conscience qui est la leur pour considérer leur place dans l’enchaînement des générations et pour adopter ce que Husserl appelle une « vocation ». La phénoménologie husserlienne des anomalies permet ainsi de reconnaître que les animaux ressortissent bien de la figure d’autrui, qu’ils sont des alter ego sujets d’une vie de conscience, et qu’à ce titre ils participent pleinement, comme les enfants, les fous et les étrangers, à la co-constitution du monde de l’esprit. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transitioning from a technical tool to a foundational infrastructural layer of societal power. As AI capabilities outpace the regulatory capacity of human institutions, the concentration of power within private entities and autonomous systems poses an existential challenge to democratic governance. While current frameworks prioritize behavioral alignment and sectoral compliance, they often overlook the fundamental problem of how AI power is organized and constrained at its source. This paper proposes CAIA (Constitutional Architecture for Artificial Intelligence), a framework (...) that redefines AI governance as a problem of constitutional power rather than mere conduct. By introducing a multi-layered architecture—comprising structural constraints on capability growth, infrastructure-level limitations, and independent constitutional oversight—CAIA provides a political–technical blueprint to prevent the irreversible concentration of AI power. This shift from shaping behavior to limiting authority offers a necessary path toward preserving human agency in an increasingly automated civilization. Note: For a detailed discussion on the philosophical foundations regarding human fragility and the ontological necessity of these limits, please refer to the author's previous work: "The Age of Fragile Intelligence — Human Survival, Power, and AI Limits" archived on PhilPapers (Dec-2025). (shrink)

I argue that considerations pertaining to constitutive luck undermine historicism—the view that an agent’s history can determine whether or not she is morally responsible. The main way that historicists have motivated their view is by appealing to certain cases of manipulation. I argue, however, that since agents can be morally responsible for performing some actions from characters with respect to which they are entirely constitutively lucky, and since there is no relevant difference between these agents and agents who have been (...) manipulated into acting from a character bestowed upon them by their manipulators, we should give up historicism. After presenting this argument and defending it against some potential objections, I briefly criticize the standard structuralist alternative and propose a new structuralist position that is shaped by reflection on constitutive luck. (shrink)

The central import of the paper, as delving into the domain of Constitutional Economics, is the contemporary relevance, and interpretive policy effects, on modern Statecraft, and more so, on Nations with fragile economic settings, within the parlance of Constitutional Jurisprudence.

It is tempting to think that in the case of complete spatio-temporal coincidence, the statue is identical with the constituent lump of clay. However, some philosophers have thought that accepting constitution as identity in this type of case forces one to reject the necessity of identity. I show that there is no conflict here. By distinguishing between an object's being necessarily an F and an object's being necessity identical with an F, we can see that accepting the necessity of (...) identity does not, and should not, compel one to reject constitution as identity. (shrink)

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity poses a serious philosophical problem. On the one hand, it seems to imply that there is exactly one divine being; on the other hand, it seems to imply that there are three. There is another well-known philosophical problem that presents us with a similar sort of tension: the problem of material constitution. We argue in this paper that a relatively neglected solution to the problem of material constitution can be developed into a (...) novel solution to the problem of the Trinity. (shrink)

Aristotle’s discussions of natural slavery, ‘barbarian kingship’, and the natural characteristics of barbarians or non-Greeks are usually read as calling into question the intellectual, ethical, and political accomplishments of non-Greeks. Such accounts of non-Greek inferiority or inability to self-govern also appear to presuppose a climatic or environmental account that on the whole would imply severe limitations on the possibility of political flourishing for peoples living outside the Greek Mediterranean basin. In light of such accounts, it is somewhat astounding to find (...) Aristotle praising the social and political institutions of Carthage within his discussion of the best constitution in the second book of the Politics. In the 4th century BCE, Carthage (modern day Tunis) was a Phoenician commercial empire that culturally and linguistically was Semitic and clearly non-Greek. That Aristotle contrasts Carthage, a non-Greek polis, favorably with both Sparta and Crete undermines both the claim that Aristotle embraced a categorical opposition between Greeks and non-Greeks and the claim that he was dismissive of the achievements of non-Greeks. (shrink)

Contemporary debates about consciousness have been carried on within an exhausted set of metaphysical options: reduction, productive emergence, and panpsychist fundamentality. Within that disjunction the hard problem appears intractable and panpsychism gathers force as the position that takes phenomenality seriously without lapsing into either reduction or brute emergence. This paper argues that the disjunction is not exhaustive and that contemporary consciousness metaphysics has been operating on an unargued premise. There is a fourth metaphysical option: constitutive identity at organizational thresholds. New (...) structural features are constituted at organizational closures in self-maintaining systems under thermodynamic pressure, with each feature being what its constituting organization is from within itself rather than something the organization produces or something present at the basic constituent level. The relation is symmetric under description, requires explicit structural specification, and is distinct from metaphysical grounding, supervenience, type-identity theory, and emergent productivism. The paper articulates this relation, shows that it operates at three organizational thresholds—autopoiesis (constituting mattering), temporogenesis (constituting felt mattering), and cognogenesis (constituting subjective consciousness)—and argues that the pattern is general, with phenomenal cases as one application among others. The pattern dissolves the panpsychist’s transcendental argument by exposing the option the argument does not consider, and renders philosophical zombies structurally incoherent for the class of systems satisfying the pattern’s three thresholds. Cosmopsychism, the strongest panpsychist alternative, is shown to face a decomposition dilemma whose only escape collapses cosmopsychism into the framework. The paper extends the pattern beyond the phenomenal case to symbiogenesis and cultural saturation, demonstrating its scope as a general metaphysics of how new structural features enter reality at organizational thresholds. The position is distinguished from panpsychism, from standard emergentism, from reductive physicalism, and from substrate-neutral functionalism, and it carries determinate empirical commitments about which systems have which phenomenal features. Phenomenal consciousness is not a property requiring derivation or basic-level instantiation; it is what certain organizational closures consist in from within, and the framework is the metaphysics that makes this option available. (shrink)

An annotated bibliography of important works on material constitution.

The aim is to examine the performative acts and gender constitution in the context of the Second British Invasion. Despite the pervasive character of patriarchy and the prevalence of sexual difference as an operative cultural distinction, gender was not passively scripted on the bodies of many British singers. The subversive performances did not exclude suffering and marginalization but simultaneously undermined compulsory coherence.

The introduction of Pakistan’s Single National Curriculum (SNC) in 2020 has triggered a constitutional dispute after the 18th Amendment of the 1973 Constitution devolved education to the provinces. This article examines whether the federal government retains constitutional authority to prescribe a uniform curriculum. Existing scholarship has focused on policy debates but has not systematically analysed the SNC’s constitutional foundation in light of post-Amendment jurisprudence. The study employs a doctrinal legal method. It analyses relevant constitutional provisions, including Article 25A (right (...) to education), Article 140A (principles of local government), and Article 142 (legislative competence), together with Supreme Court decisions and intergovernmental coordination mechanisms. The analysis assesses the scope of federal authority and the limits of provincial autonomy in curriculum regulation. The findings show that the federal government may promote coordination and minimum standards. However, direct imposition of a uniform curriculum lacks a clear constitutional basis without structured provincial consent or constitutional amendment. The article clarifies the boundaries of legislative power in Pakistan’s federal system and argues for a cooperative model of education governance that aligns national objectives with constitutional devolution. (shrink)