Michel Seymour

Secession as a Remedial Right1

Allen Buchanan holds that nations do not have a general primary unilateral right to secede. However, nations could legitimately secede if there were a special right to do so, if it were the result of negotiations and, more importantly, if some previous injustice had to be repaired. According to Buchanan, the three kinds of injustice that allow for unilateral secession are: violation of human rights, unjust annexation of territories, and systematic violations of previous agreements on self‐government. I agree that nations only have a general remedial right to unilateral secession. But I argue that nations also have a general primary right to self‐determination not held by other cultural groups. In virtue of this general primary right, nations also have a primary right to internal self‐determination. I will then argue that the “past injustices” should include a failure to comply with internal self‐determination. I also want to show that this alternative version of the Remedial Right Only theory meets the constraints, imposed by Buchanan himself, upon any satisfactory institutionalization of the principles governing secession. In the end, it will appear that my own version fares much better than Buchanans in meeting these constraints.

Indirect discourse and quotation

Davidson’s paratactic theory of indirect discourse constitutes a first attempt to account for the opacity of indirect discourse locutions while preserving at the same time semantic innocence, i.e., the intuition that expressions occurring in an intensional context very often behave as they ordinarily do in other non-intensional contexts. Its interest in this regard lies in part in the way it successfully avoids any recourse to intensional entities and paves the way for a vindication of sentential theories of propositional attitude sentences. It is also the first theory that is at the same time able to satisfy the constraints imposed by a semantic account that would meet the requirements of a finitely axiomatized, compositional, recursive theory of truth for the language. In this paper, I rehearse the very long list of criticisms that have been raised against Davidson’s paratactic theory of indirect discourse. Instead, I formulate an alternative quotational account based on a concept of quotation understood as a functional device belonging to a substitutional language. I will briefly indicate how this new approach enables one to circumvent the difficulties of the paratactic theory while preserving its virtues.

The Plural States of Recognition

Introduction M.Seymour Aristotle and Hegel on Recognition and Friendship R.R.Williams Hegel, Taylor and the Phenomenology of Broken Spirits R.Bhargava Respect as Recognition: Some Political Implications A.E.Galeotti Esteem for Contributions to the Common Good: The Role of Personifying Attitudes and Instrumental Value H.Ikaheimo & A.Laitinen Models of Democracy and the Politics of Recognition: Respect for Reasonable Cultural Diversity as a Principle of Political Morality S.Thompson Respect for Reasonable Cultural Diversity as a Principle of Political Morality J.Maclure Difference, Multi and Equality T.Modood Political Liberalism and the Recognition of Peoples M.Seymour Multicultural Manners J.T.Levy The Public Assessment of Indigenous Identity A.Eisenberg Conclusion M.Seymour

Speech act pluralism, minimal content and pragmemes

As speech acts in contexts, pragmemes serve to illustrate speech act pluralism. What is less clear is whether they play an important role in determining the primary meanings of sentences. Semantic contextualism is the view according to which word meaning or sentence meaning cannot be detached from some extralinguistic features of their utterance. Semantic minimalism suggests another way of conceiving the relationship between sentence meaning and pragmemes. Some sentence-types may express only “proposition-radicals”, as suggested by Kent Bach. Are there however pragmemes that determine primary sentence meanings and that are not prescribed by the very semantic features of the sentence? Carston and Recanati both argue that there are. However, cancel ability reveals the presence of a minimal accessible content that could be expressed without these additional features. Are there pragmemes determining primary sentence meanings that are not prescribed by semantic features and that are not cancelable? In this paper, I argue that there are no such examples. Pragmemes may contribute to the determination of the content of certain assertions, but they do not contribute to the determination of minimal content of the sentence-types used in these utterances. I conclude that a proper appreciation of the role of pragmemes forces us to accept speech act pluralism and bifurcationism, the idea that there are two levels of content: minimal and maximal. That is, different pragmemes produce different inferential augmentations of a minimal level of linguistic meaning. But this is precisely what semantic minimalism is all about.

Peoples, political liberalism and religious diversity:

In this article I first develop a particular definition of misrecognition understood as a particular kind of political resistance to formally institutionalized rights of persons and peoples. It is exemplified in the refusal to move from moral rights to legal rights. I therefore provide an institutional and not a psychological account of misrecognition. In the second part of the article, I present political liberalism and I show how it is able to accommodate the rights of persons and peoples. In the third and last part of the article, I examine one particular argument that affects ethno-religious groups in particular. With the help of the theoretical resources of political liberalism, I am in a position to achieve a delicate balance between the recognition of the individual rights of persons and the collective rights of peoples.

Political Liberalism and the Recognition of Peoples

Several authors criticize the idea that peoples can be objects of recognition. And yet, the concept of recognition plays a central role in international law. For example, recognition from the international community is fundamental for a people to become a sovereign state. We also have to ponder the fact that most if not all peoples without a sovereign state are involved in a battle for recognition. This, at least, is the case for the Catalan, Basque, Galician, Corsican, Scottish, Welsh, Walloon, Flemish, Quebec, Acadian, Palestinian and Tibetan peoples, and so on, and it is also true for all Aboriginal peoples. So why do so many recognition theorists have a critical view concerning the claims of peoples? In addition to reservations motivated by political reasons, there are also worries that have their basis in a number of philosophical objections. It is the latter that I wish to examine in this chapter. I want to answer certain questions about the recognition of peoples — and more precisely, about a particular version of the politics of recognition. I will explore a form of recognition that is manifested in the granting of collective rights to peoples.

Two Concepts of Belief

Contemporary analytical philosophy is replete with philosophical distinctions. Such is, for better or for worse, the result of the systematically performing conceptual analysis in a piecemeal way. The results are not always enchanting. Very often, we find that some of those distinctions are not well motivated or that they could be reduced to other previously introduced distinctions. This was, for instance, the case with the so called distinction between the referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions. As Kripke has shown, the distinction turned out to be unmotivated as a semantic distinction, since it could be handled by exploiting already existing semantic resources such as the de re / de dicto distinction or the one between the small scope and wide scope of quantifiers.1 It could also be shown that if a language contains no singular terms, and if Russell’s theory of descriptions can be maintained, the distinction between de re / de dicto reports and the distinction between small scope / wide scope occurrences of quantifiers amount to the same thing. Philosophical distinctions can, up to a certain point, be useful tools for the analytical philosopher, but she must sooner or later be ready for a more synthetic approach. Otherwise, we run the risk of losing sight of the more general philosophical picture. By always looking at the trees, we run the risk of losing sight of the forest.

Une conception sociopolitique de la nation

I submit what, I believe, is a fairly new definition of the nation, one which I call the sociopolitical conception. I try to avoid as much as possible the traditional dichotomy between the exclusively civic and ethnic accounts, and try to explain my reasons for doing so. I also adopt as a general framework a certain conceptual pluralism which allows me to use many different concepts of the nation. After that, I proceed by formulating some constraints on any acceptable new definition. My own sociopolitical conception is then finally introduced. The sociopolitical nation is a political community, most often composed, sociologically, of a national majority, national minorities, and individuals with other national origins. The concept of national majority is crucial for the account and refers to the largest sample in the world of a given population sharing a common language, history, and culture. National minorities are defined as extensions of neighbouring nations, while individuals of other national origins are those members of ethnic minorities that have come from immigration. There would be no sociopolitical nation if there were no national majority, but this is compatible with a pluricultural and multi-ethnic view of the nation, since the political community may also include national minorities and individuals with a different origin. I end the article by showing that this definition meets the constraints that were initially introduced.

Three Thought Experiments Revisited

I would like to reexamine the thought experiments that are very often invoked by those who argue for anti-individualism. I will try to reevaluate those experiments by interpreting the statements that they purport to elucidate within a general semantical framework which accounts for the meaning of sentences in terms of assertability conditions.