Friday, April 10, 2026

Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto

Talk title: "Rules, Like Birds, Must Live Before They are Stuffed"

Description: "This paper explores and defends the pragmatist account of rules or laws, as articulated by F.P. Ramsey, Margaret Macdonald, and Gilbert Ryle. Rules, to use Ryle’s lovely phrase, are living things, not bits of code: they must live before they are stuffed. They are also in principle malleable. Some conclusions are then drawn about whether there are constitutive rules and about the nature of legal rules. Along the way, the traditional sceptical problems about rule-following and induction are shown to be pieces of misguided metaphysics rightly abandoned by the pragmatist."

3:30pm

Location: TBA

Funded by the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy, which is an endowment established in 1996 to help support the study of philosophy at Dartmouth College. For more information on Philosophy's Sapientia Lecture Series, please visit this link.