Should reasoning be handed to mechanical procedure?

Whether disputes can be settled by calculation, and what is lost when rules replace judgment.

Direction Machine-like humans
Span c. 340 BCE–1936
Questions 3
Works 24
Languages Greek, Chinese, French, Italian, English, German, Latin

  1. Q10Can a fixed procedure for reasoning settle a disagreement when the participants accept the same premises?

    Yes4

    No4

    • 1670Pascal, Pensées

      Distinguishes the geometrical mind, which reasons from explicit principles, from the intuitive mind (esprit de finesse), which grasps principles too many and subtle to state, and says the two cannot be reduced to each other.

    • 1895Carroll, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles

      Shows in dialogue that a party who accepts the premises can still refuse the conclusion, because each rule of inference added as a new premise demands another rule to apply it.

    • 1908Poincaré, Science and Method

      Poincaré argues that blind adherence to rules would require infallibility, whereas logicians have encountered contradictions and are revising their rules.

    • 1936Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem

      Proves that no general mechanical procedure can decide, for every statement of first-order logic, whether it follows from given axioms.

  2. Q11Should a judge follow a general rule when it produces an unjust result in a particular case?

    Yes3

    • 1748Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws

      Says judges should be only the mouth that pronounces the words of the law, inanimate beings who cannot moderate its force or severity.

    • 1764Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments

      Holds that criminal judges must not interpret the law or consult its 'spirit', but apply it by a single syllogism, since interpretation opens the door to arbitrary judgment.

    • 1765Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England

      Allows equity to correct law's generality but holds that law without equity, though hard, is better than equity without law, which would make every judge a legislator.

    No5

    • c. 340 BCEAristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

      Defines equity as the correction of law where it is defective because of its generality, and says the judge should decide as the legislator would have if present.

    • 1884Jhering, Jest and Earnest in Jurisprudence

      In the satire, the heaven of theoretical concepts is separated from the practitioners’ afterlife: practitioners could neither breathe nor see in the theorists’ world. This excerpt does not give a particular unjust judicial decision.

    • 1899Gény, Method of Interpretation and Sources in Private Positive Law

      Argues that the code cannot supply every answer and that where it is silent the judge must use custom and 'free scientific research' rather than force the text.

    • 1906Flavius, The Battle for Legal Science

      Manifesto of the Free Law movement, arguing that judges already decide with more freedom than the statute allows and should do so openly.

    • 1908Pound, Mechanical Jurisprudence

      Criticizes judges who deduce decisions mechanically from fixed conceptions regardless of results, and calls for law judged by how it works in practice.

  3. Q12Can numerical measures adequately determine a person's fitness for a position of responsibility?

    Yes4

    • 1854Stafford et al., Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service

      Recommends that entry to the civil service be decided by open competitive examination instead of patronage.

    • 1869Galton, Hereditary Genius

      Ranks men by reputation on a graded statistical scale of natural ability, using judges and statesmen as samples, and treats that ability as measurable and inherited.

    • 1913Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency

      Proposes selecting workers, including tram drivers and ship officers, by laboratory tests of the mental traits each job requires.

    • 1916Terman, The Measurement of Intelligence

      Terman anticipates occupational intelligence-quotient thresholds and recommends psychologists to screen applicants, while denying that available tests can unerringly select a precise occupation for each person.

    No3

    • 1663Huang Zongxi, Waiting for the Dawn

      Criticizes the examination system for selecting officials by a narrow written test, and proposes several alternative routes of recruitment such as recommendation and appointment.

    • 1857Trollope, The Three Clerks

      Satirizes competitive examination for the civil service through the examiners Sir Gregory Hardlines and Mr Jobbles and a clerk who passes the test but proves dishonest.

    • 1922Lippmann, The Mental Age of Americans

      Argues in six New Republic essays that the Army tests do not measure inborn intelligence and that the claim of an average mental age of fourteen is nonsense.

    Qualified1

    • 1909Binet, Modern Ideas About Children

      Binet argues that distraction, discomfort or boredom can cause failure on a test, making measurement of a child’s intelligence from very few tests absurd. This is a qualification of testing, not a rejection of all tests.