In Constitutional Identity, Gary Jacobsohn highlights the tension both within constitutional systems and between constitutions and societal norms (culture). In this essay, we explore the first tension and glance at the second. One objective of the essay is to enumerate a set of “disharmonies” that appear with some frequency within constitutions and, employing historical data, identify the constitutional systems that contain them. Appealing to formal logic, we develop a taxonomy that helps us understand the kinds of disharmonies on display; a taxonomy that points to their sources. The essay thus generalizes Jacobsohn’s notion of disharmony and extends his insights from a small set of cases that begin with the letter “I” to a larger set.

I spell out Kuhn’s rationale for pursuing the evolutionary approach. He first concluded that the historical record does not support the assumption that science develops teleologically towards the truth, which then led him to outline an evolutionary view of scientific development. Kuhn argues that the future of the sciences is open-ended and that the sciences are bound to diversify, not unify. Because the historical process of the sciences leads to an ever more fragmented outcome, there is no coherent worldview at the end of this process. Kuhn thought that not only sciences fail to arrive at the final truth about the world, but that truth as correspondence to the mind-independent world must be rejected. Because sciences’ niches, in which sciences are practiced, change, there simply is no fixed and permanent mind-independent world to which statements and theories could correspond. Nevertheless, Kuhn was interested in the function of ‘truth,’ that is, the possibility to judge whether beliefs and theories should be accepted or rejected. I argue that a specific Sellarsian pragmatist notion of truth, which understands truth as semantic assertibility, serves Kuhn’s interests well.

Drawing on both Statius’s Thebaid and Boccaccio’s Teseida, The Knight’s Tale uncomfortably sutures the horrors of epic tragedy to the idealism of chivalric romance, inflecting both with the philosophical ambitions of Boethius’s Consolation. This chapter traces the modern engagement with the tale as a history of attempts to understand the tensions produced by its multiple sources, genres, and rhetorical registers, and explores how accounts of its form inflect and are inflected by accounts of its politics. Politics here, as in other Canterbury Tales, is as much a matter of gender and sexuality as it is of class, rule, and social order. Moreover, the problems posed by aesthetic and political form become problems of how to understand the relations among the text, its pilgrim narrator, and the author. Beginning with the high formalist moment of postwar criticism, the chapter follows the development of ideology critique and of feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, each of which remains attuned to earlier formalist questions. The Knight’s Tale that emerges from this history is a text of great aesthetic ambition, whose aims are as much reflected in its incoherences as in its formalist impulses.

Annotations and “translations” of the seemingly cryptic statements of President Donald Trump have been an ongoing feature of media coverage of his candidacy and the first year of his presidency. Efforts in the media to decipher Trump’s enigmatic references have presented Donald Trump and his campaign as communicating in a language unintelligible to mainstream media audiences. As in Keith Basso’s account of a Western Apache speech genre termed “speaking with names” (1996), the coherence and significance of Donald Trump’s use of proper names and a variety of other expressions often become clear only when linked to a context at a remove from their immediate surround, generally one found in the world of conservative and alt-right media. In providing such clarification, mainstream media annotations of Donald Trump’s words render his speeches a moment of something like language contact between two distinct communicative worlds: the “right-wing” and the “mainstream.” The result is the aggravation of divisions between multiple disconnected communicative “silos” or “bubbles.” Trump’s verbal practices thus bring into question the very existence of something that might be called “the American public.”