Context plays a crucial role in our propositional attitude reporting practices. A belief-reporting sentence (containing no obvious indexical elements) which seems true in one context may seem false in another, as Kripke showed us in ‘A Puzzle About Belief.’ To put it a bit sloppily, (1) may seem true when we are discussing Peter's beliefs regarding Paderewski-the-pianist and false when we are discussing his beliefs regarding Paderewski-the-statesman.

A number of recent theorists have taken this contextual variation very seriously, and attempted to provide accounts which accommodate it in one way or another. Salmon and Soames accommodate the variation in pragmatics, arguing that our intuitions about attitude reporting often result from mistaking pragmatic implicatures for semantic content. Other theorists have offered semantic accounts which yield contextually varying truth conditions for belief reporting sentences. I have a great deal of sympathy for the project: I think the contextually varying intuitions do exist, and that they need to be accommodated, in one way or another. I am not so sure, however, that this can be done.

It is a main theme of Donald Davidson's theory of interpretation that interpretive charity is a sine qua non of interpretation. Interpretive charity is necessary for interpretation to get off the ground, for without being charitable, that is, without taking the speaker to be rational by our standards and taking what he holds true to be in fact true by our lights as far as possible, there is no hope that we can, as it were, break into the circle of his mental states, meanings, and behavior. Charity is not merely a necessity at the initial stage of the interpretive process, but an ever-present constraint on interpretation. In other words, there can never be a point in the interpretive process where the interpreter can cease to be charitable. This is, at least partly, explained by another main theme of Davidson's theory, namely, that understanding and communication require massive agreement between interpreter and speaker.

The publication of Political Liberalismhas allowed John Rawls to bring to the fore issues that remained in the background of A Theory of Justice. His explicit attention to the concept of ‘the reasonable’ is a welcome development. In a more recent publication, he affirms the importance of this concept, ‘while [granting] that the idea of the reasonable needs a more thorough examination than Political Liberalism offers.’ In this paper, I will present a critical exposition of the senses of the reasonable on which justice as fairness relies. Rawls employs the term in four main contexts. I will outline these various senses and argue that in each case, a controversy in the secondary literature can be resolved by close attention to the concept of the reasonable. In three of these contexts, Rawls relies on what I will call a ‘strong’ sense of the reasonable, while in one he sometimes seems to rely on a ‘weak’ sense. I argue that justice as fairness is best served by relying on a strong sense throughout.

In their 1969 so-called White Paper on Indian Policy,Pierre Trudeau's government argued that it was time to abolish the group-specific rights differentiating Aboriginal people from other Canadians, including, in some Aboriginal societies, the group-specific right to restrict voting, residency, public office, and other social goods, to their Aboriginal members. Given the negative impact the loss of such so-called collective or group rights would have on the security of their cultures, Aboriginal people were incensed, and, consequently, the federal liberals backed down. More recently, Gordon Campbell maintained as a 1996 election promise that, were his provincial liberal party to be elected in British Columbia, he would oppose group-specific rights for Aboriginal people in British Columbia. Both Trudeau and Campbell argued that it is wrong for Aboriginal people to have group-specific rights by appeal to the idea that such collective rights are discriminatory because they assign opportunities to individuals on the basis of culture or race. Political elites are not alone in thinking that collective rights override individual rights. In fact, it has become a national motif that Section 15 (1) of the Canadian Charter, which makes it illegal to discriminate on the grounds that citizens are to be guaranteed equal protection of the law, is incompatible with group-specific rights for Aboriginal people.

Le philosophe mit le pied sur la première marche du futurotron. C'était la première fois qu'il utilisait cet appareil pour ses recherches. Bien qu'il vienne seulement d'être mis au point et qu'il ne soit encore qu'à l'état de prototype, ce futurotron pouvait décidément rendre de grands services. De nombreux chercheurs de différentes disciplines l'avaient d'ailleurs déjà utilisé de manière très fructueuse.