The guest for this sixth episode of the HAPL podcast is Antonia Waltermann, currently is assistant professor of legal theory and philosophy at the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University (Netherlands).
In this episode, we delve into the topics of non-human agents, the construction of legal reality, and the encompassing role of legal education. What does it mean to be an agent? In which sense can we talk about non-human agents? Can we say that legal reality is “constructed”? How do we fit non-human agents within this legal reality? How does legal education participate in it? In dialogue with , with Julieta Rabanos and Bojan Spaić, Antonia Waltermann discusses with us why researching on agency is important for the study of law, and why it is also important to extend the research also to what can be called “non-human agents”. We also explore what does it mean for legal reality to be a social construction and how and to what extent non-human agents might be considered as participating in such construction, as well as how legal education fits the picture through its presence, content, and influence on human agents.
Below, you can find the full transcription corresponding to this episode*:
Bojan Spaić
Welcome to a new episode of heavily accented philosophy of flow with my co-host Juliette Arabinose, and myself, blends Paige. We’re here in Belgrade talking to our today’s guest, Antonia Walterman from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Hi, Antonia. Welcome.
Antonia Waltermann
Hi. Thanks so, much for having me.
Bojan Spaić
We’ll let you in on a trade secret. This is like the 7th time that we’re doing this introduction.
Julieta Rabanos
Yes, you are not like live with the bloopers that preceded this recording of the episode, but Antonia does. And she’s like with this face of, oh again, like the 4th or the 5th time.
Bojan Spaić
Yes, apart from torturing our guests today, we also feel like we are stuck in Groundhog Day, just repeating the same every 10 minutes because our audio stuff is not working today the way it should. But anyways, very nice to see you and very nice to have you here. We would of course love to have you in person, but there will be opportunities and chances, I’m sure, especially since we agree with most of the guests who do follow up episodes on different topics.
Bojan Spaić
Let us start the way we usually start these conversations by asking you a question about your academic path to the present. So, if you could tell us something a bit about it, it would be fantastic.
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, absolutely. So, my academic colleague has essentially been Maastricht University for the entirety of my career so, far, with the exception where I’ve been privileged enough to be able to go on some research visits to other universities. But I’ve been employed at my university, and I was also a student there before that.
When I was finishing high school, thinking about what I might want to do with my life, I thought about studying philosophy and then thought, well, maybe I should do something a bit more practical with my life. And so, I decided I would study law, and then in my second year I had the opportunity to take an elective on legal philosophy. And that was essentially the end of my pragmatism, and I’ve been essentially working in legal philosophy, sometimes just straight up philosophy, ever since. But yes, so, my background is in comparative European and international law. But I think by what I actually do, I’m very much more a philosopher than I am a lawyer these days.
Julieta Rabanos
I think that you’re describing some path that we, or at least a lot of people that I know within legal philosophy, took, in the sense of like saying, OK, I’m interested in this specific aspects of the thing, but maybe I need to do something more practical, or something that can give me some money to live by.
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, that was the concern. And I also didn’t want to become a high school teacher. Of course, now I teach at university, so, I’m not sure whether I really would not have liked it back then. But those were kind of the considerations I had at the time, like I’d like to have a gallery and maybe not stand in front of high school students. It’s my surprise, I quite like education as well nowadays, so, it’s turned out alright for me.
Bojan Spaić
I’m actually stunned by your rationality because I wasn’t rational or practical in that way at all. My parents made me do law, and I did philosophy basically in hiding from them. Yep. So, I was doing philosophy or law in parallel, but I didn’t ever tell them that I’m going to exams of philosophy and stuff like that. It was completely so. It’s another thing. Amazing.
Antonia Waltermann
No, I think my parents would have supported me during philosophy, that I was a very pragmatic child, I guess, or a teenager at the time.
Bojan Spaić
That’s a fantastic thing to hear. I always want to think that I became pragmatic in time. But when I was 8, I wasn’t thinking about whether I’m going to earn for a living or anything like that. I was just interested in the things that I was interested. But kudos for you. I’m completely to stand by this. And also, it reinforces my thesis that men should enroll into faculties at 22, 23. Women are OK at 18, it’s fine.
Antonia Waltermann
I think there’s some studies on brain developments and then women at different ages, but I’d have to look those up, but you might be on to something there.
Bojan Spaić
Might be.
Julieta Rabanos
It was thinking about, hmm. Well, I think that our first question can be nicely threaded with these considerations, which is basically agency. In the sense that we know that you research on agency, and specific sub-topics within agency, but maybe we can start with a more general question: agency in law, and why do you think that researching on agency is important when you’re researching?
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, I think if we understand agency broadly, so, not in like the really technical legal sense of like, you know, laws of agency and like representing someone, I’m not talking about that. But if we understand it in a more philosophical sense of like the capacity to act, the capacity to do things, I mean that’s something that the law is constantly concerned with, right? so, much of the law is either talking about consequences of doing things: you’ve done something that was prohibited, and so, we’re going to throw you in jail, give you a fine, something like that. Or it’s making certain actions possible, or even creating certain agents, for example a parliament.
But it’s also making, without the legal institution of contracting, then it would be impossible for us to conclude contracts that are legally enforced. So, it’s also making actions possible. But for that, the law, I think, needs to have a concept, or various concepts, of what an agent is, what kinds of entities or beings it considers to be agents. I’m from memorizing the law here a little bit. The law considers entities to be agents. Which agencies are considered? Yes. Anyways, you know what I mean. So, there’s a lot of conceptions or ideas about agents kind of underlying everything in law, both from questions of responsibility to questions of just what’s possible, what can be done, and who can do things.
The obvious candidate, of course, is sort of persons in law. But I think in every field of law, from private law to constitutional law and administrative law, there’s some conception of what an agent is and what capabilities agents have, how rational they are or not, who’s worthy of protection because there are weaker party. There’s a lot of different conceptions of agency and different ideas of what it means to be an agent underlying the law. So, I think for law this is just something that’s threaded through everything that we do.
Bojan Spaić
Would you say that you started with thinking about philosophy of agency and agency from philosophical standpoint and came to law, or was it something that law inspired you to look into when you were doing your research?
Antonia Waltermann
So it came up, I think, the first time when I was writing my PhD. My PhD was on sovereignty and the concept of sovereignty in both constitutional and international law, so, both sort of on the national side and the international side. And one of the arguments that I made in my PhD is that it might be useful to consider having a kind of equivalent in international law to popular sovereignty on the national level.
So an idea of law states constitute the international legal system, or the international legal system emanates from states in much the same way that we say that the national legal system and state power on the national level emanates from the people. But if you’re making that argument, you’re kind of presupposing that state can act in the same way, or in an analogous way, to individuals. And in my PhD, I kind of just move over that. I think I had that one paragraph of like, yes, no, this is OK, we can totally do this. And then later I was like, wait a minute. It’s not actually the case. Let me think about that a little bit more.
And then first I did some other things, but I kept coming back to this question, and that, I think, sparked my interest in thinking about agents. And then, yes, also more concretely, and I think we’ll come to that as well, non-human agent.
Julieta Rabanos
Before moving towards the like the non-human part of agency studies, I wanted just to jump in to say that in my case, for example, the questions about agency came from my studies in criminal law, in the sense of when I was an undergrad. All the questions are specifically in regards to what is an action, when you can say that someone has act, and then naturally all the, well, I think that the English equivalent would be mensural, which is like the state of mind or the state of maybe will that someone has when you say that they had some control over the actions or over the things like. So, in my case, for example, things about agency came from there.
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, absolutely. And I think, yes, you get a lot of these discussions, I think particularly in criminal law, also with regards to questions of free will, could they have done otherwise, etcetera, which I think is absolutely fascinating. But I also find it quite interesting that we do this a lot with criminal law, but then much less, for example, for private law, although of course it’s also the case that, you know, people do things that have huge consequences for their lives in private law.
And if we’re talking about questions of free will and being contractually barrent, or if we talk about irrationality, for example, or biases, particularly unconscious ones, and say the sale of a house, I think there’s very interesting questions there. So, they’ve done studies that apparently if you bake an apple pie before showing people your house, people are more likely to offer more for the house. Yes. What does that kind of thing mean, if anything, for our legal practices and for saying that, you know, people have really consider their choices? I find these kinds of questions very, very interesting.
Bojan Spaić
It’s very interesting, in fact, to move all kinds of questions in philosophy of law towards private matters. I think that there is a bigger tradition in the Anglo-American world to discuss private law issues within philosophy of law whilst, on the European continent, there is an inclination, and quite a strong one I think might come from Germany, in fact, to connect issues of philosophy of law almost exclusively with public law.
And I can mention a few examples. Yes. For example, you rarely find people who discuss private law principles. For example, even with Alexy’s principles theory, you always find his public law principles without any discussion on the principles of private law, and so, on. And so, do you have any thoughts of that? Have you ever thought about this topic?
Antonia Waltermann
Not really something I’ve thought of before, but now that you mention it, yes, I think you’re right in that I’m currently developing a course on philosophy of private law with a colleague from the private law department, and a lot of the authors that we’re going to end up using are Anglo American, because those are the ones. Absolutely not exclusively, but I think a lot of the kind of private law theorizing does come more from that fear.
Whereas, yes, I mean Germany definitely is very big on theorising constitutional matters. In the Netherlands, I see a similar trend, I think, by and large. France also very much, I think. No.
Bojan Spaić
Yes, it would seem that these traditions are inclined towards public law might be something to do with when you have a layer.
Julieta Rabanos
Maybe the way in which law in itself is conceived.
Bojan Spaić
Yes, could be about that. But also, Germany has this funny way. I mean, Antonia is in the Netherlands, quite happy to be, I think, in the Netherlands, and in the layers tool in Germany, there are not many layers tools in there. There is one, I think, in Germany, layer tool in philosophy in law of law.
Antonia Waltermann
Just one, yes.
Bojan Spaić
The other ones are the combination of a branch of law, which is usually either criminal law or constitutional law, and philosophy of.
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, I think there might be one or two of private law, but only one or two.
Bojan Spaić
Yes, it is way, way, way rare. But let me turn back to this, the thing. Yes. Let’s go back, because we are straying. I love digressing. And did two lectures today. I digressed a lot.
Julieta Rabanos
Let’s go back.
Bojan Spaić
So, uh, you were, we were talking about agency and philosophy of agency in general, but some of your work has been focused on something that hasn’t been discussed much in philosophy of agency, and even in philosophy of agency or agency related to law, namely, we usually talk about human agents. What you have been addressing in your work in a very, very peculiar and interesting way, I think, non-human agent. So, I was kind of interested in what would you call, or how would you define or determine these non-human agents, and why would the study of non-human agents be important for philosophical research in law?
Antonia Waltermann
Yes. So, obviously, if we just talk about non-human agents, it’s any kind of agent that’s not human. That’s a bit broader than what I actually do. So, what I tend to look at are sort of parliaments, states, corporations, and artificial intelligence. And sometimes I dabble in, say, animals and natural entities, especially now, since there’s more of a movement of looking at, you know, should natural entities, should ecosystems, for example, have rights, movements that actually give legal personality or some kind of legal status to different ecosystems? And so, I’m also taking those on board more and more.
And I think it’s interesting to look at these for really a number of reasons. So, for some of them, I think it’s quite interesting first and foremost because they are kind of created by law, right? A parliament wouldn’t exist without a constitution. That kind of makes the parliament exist, that constitutes the parliament, but then the parliament is also the entity, the agent, the corporate or composite agent that creates a lot of the rest of the legal system. So, I think from that perspective, it’s quite interesting.
But what I also find really interesting is looking at non-human agents as a kind of mirror to human agents. And this is something that I find particularly interesting with regards to the discussions of sort of artificial intelligence, because what I think we can see there oftentimes is that we ask certain things of AI that I think we don’t necessarily ask of human beings. One argument, for example, that you see a lot is that, oh, we can’t have artificial intelligence, we can’t have an AI judge, because the AI judge would be a black box. And implicitly, we’re presupposing that we have an idea of how a human judge comes to a legal decision, and that the human judge is not a black box. So, I think it also serves as a kind of interesting mirror for looking at ourself through the lens of looking at nonhuman agents.
So, I think they’re interesting to study in their own right just because they do have a huge impact on the legal system, on what is going on, plus on, if we look at, you know, the impact, certainly these days, of corporations, for example worldwide. I think these are interesting agents from that perspective. I think they’re really interesting agents from a more philosophical, legal, philosophical perspective, because we’re looking at what are the criteria that we actually presupposed for considering an entity to be an agent, to be able to act, to be able to be responsible or liable, and so, they can serve kind of as a reflection point.
Particularly, I think whenever there’s new kinds of agents popping up, I think this is a really nice moment for this kind of reflection and mirroring of what criteria are we actually setting? What are we presupposing?
Bojan Spaić
Yes, this is actually a topic that I have been thinking about recently to a significant extent, especially regarding these two instances that you mentioned about non-human agents. And I was thinking also about the different thing. Basically the first one. The first idea is that we have this tendency to anthropomorphize every non-human entity that acts or that is an actor in any way, shape or form, and like institutions, like artificial intelligence and so, on and so, on. And then while we are anthropomorphizing, we also give, to the institution or to artificial intelligence, we have this tendency to ascribe to it some mental states, for example.
Antonia Waltermann
Absolutely, yes. And then we talk about, yes, things are being interpreted according to, you know, the intention of the legislature, for example, that’s a big one, but also, yes, I find this a really interesting topic.
Especially when we’re talking about mental states. And there again, I think it’s an interesting question of mirroring as well, because I think we tend to presuppose that these non-human agents don’t actually have mental states, but we treat them as though they have mental states. So, there’s kind of different layers to this, right. At first glance we talk about them like they definitely have mental states. Oh, the state consented to this treaty, or they have the intention to be legally bound, or yes, we interpret things according to the intention of the legislature.
So, on one level we talk as if it’s obvious that they have certain intentionality. Then when we start theorizing, I think there’s a lot of theories where it’s like, oh, we say that, but what we’re actually doing is we’re attributing the intention of a human agent to the non-human agent, and that’s how that works. So, there’s, I think, a lot of theories that kind of fall into that category.
And then there’s theories that kind of say no, but it’s not just a question of kind of attribution of human agency or human intentionality to the non-human agent. There’s a kind of intentionality that they have that goes beyond the sum of their parts at any rate. And this is also, I think, something that’s quite interesting.
This kind of model of attributing the intentionality of a human agent to a non-human agent works for some of the agents that we have. So, it works, for example, for parliament, because that’s obviously made up of human legislators, although whether they agree on anything I think is a different question. It works for corporations. It works for states. But, for example, it doesn’t work for artificial intelligence. Who’s the human agent whose intentionality we attribute to the artificial intelligence? The user? The programmer? so, I think there the link already starts to break down. And if we’re looking at natural entities, say an ecosystem, it becomes even more tenuous.
I think these theories kind of tend to break down, which might be a reason why then a lot of theorists say, well, you know, we cannot treat them that way. We should not treat them that way because they really don’t have this kind of intentionality. But if we flip it around again, I think the question then is also, to be able to say that we have those mental States and where they come from.
I tend to kind of go with Daniel Dennett on this, who says that, you know, there’s not like a little chamber in your brain that’s the control centre, and there’s a little you in that control centre, and that’s who’s making all the decisions, but rather there’s a lot of sort of different parts of your brain that are all doing different things, and eventually you kind of story emerges that explains what you’ve been doing. And so, we kind of ascribe intentionality, I think, to ourselves, and we kind of tell a story about ourselves.
In much the same way that we tell a story about these non-human agents having intentionality, so, we’re kind of constantly taking the intentional stance to other agents.
For example, I’m taking the intentional stance to, well, not even the two of you, but rather the representation of the two of you that I’m seeing on my computer screen right now, and I’m ascribing intentionality to those representations. I’m assuming you know that you have intentionality, and I’m assuming that you assume the same about me. So, we’re taking this intentional stance, and I think we have very good reason to do that with ourselves and with each other, and so, I think the question becomes: when do we have good reasons to take the intentional stance to an entity and to therefore interpret that entity as an agent and to interpret that entity as acting, rather than as just kind of being, you know, the flow of the laws of nature and physics.
Julieta Rabanos
When you were speaking, I was thinking, with this idea of like the mirror, that we are looking on at non-human agents, or at least alleged agents, can serve for us to go back to our presuppositions and assumptions. Naturally it goes back also to maybe some of the very foundations of bases of our types of law and legal systems, which is basically the deal free real, which is presupposed in this sense, but also I was thinking, because I think that also the mere idea of intentionality is something that I feel, or I felt when I was researching on that, that it’s already ascribed, in the sense of that we don’t know whether we are determined or not, whether we really have, well, depending on naturally how you interpret intention as, which is another debate in this sense, but let’s go with the very superficial, like maybe the possibility to have this idea of means to an end, so, to act in with these. Maybe coming from criminal law, for me it was always an inscription, an external description. Then, naturally, the question was: when do we have good reasons to make this description?
I think that in this sense, what you were saying, it’s really interesting because these have been things that maybe we did not, we have discussed at some point, but then we settled on those, because we needed that to construct maybe legal reality or social reality in some sense, and then we didn’t go back. And then we are going back, yes, we are going back again with these non-human agents.
Antonia Waltermann
Absolutely. Yes, I think so. Sort of add added. Very hard and I think especially, so, if we take the free will debate into it, this makes perfect sense, I think.
We have, so, if we look at the best kind of physics, like theories of physics at the moment, if we look at the natural sciences, there’s a certain kind of image of how the world works and how we work within the world, that’s very kind of doesn’t leave that much room for free will, if any, let’s say. So, it’s of a very kind of deterministic, or indeterministic within random charms kind of picture.
And what I find really interesting is then to have the question of, OK, so, if that’s the picture that’s put forward by the natural sciences, and we have this picture of law, which is a social institution, where we treat each other as agents, we hold each other responsible for things. We also create new agents that we might then hold responsible. How does that picture of law fit into the bigger picture of sort of reality as such? That’s a pretty kind of the question. So, I’m not tackling that one in some specific terms, but I think that’s kind of the underlying sort of background that drives me a little bit, where with each kind of research project, I try to carve out a little piece of that, a little bit more at least for myself.
Julieta Rabanos
Do you think that going back a little bit on the deal free wheel, but also agency, and then you mentioned responsibility and liability, do you think that the agency is intrinsically, or the question about agency is intrinsically linked to the questions about responsibility?
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, I definitely think so. So, I think both in law and when it comes to sort of moral and social acts of holding each other responsible, we hold each other mostly, we hold each other responsible. The starting point is that we hold each other responsible for things that we did where we had some kind of, that didn’t just happen, but that were intentionally done. I think that’s kind of the starting point.
Law has partially moved away from that and that there are things like strict liability etcetera, ultra, but still the starting point is kind of this idea of if. If we’re talking private law thought liability, certainly in criminal law there’s a lot of emphasis on questions of men’s rail and I think we tend to assume that, you know, you’ve done something and that’s what we’re holding you responsible for. It’s not that, you know, something just happened and that’s what we’re holding you responsible for again. Within the law, there are certain circumstances where we do that.
But I don’t think that that’s sort of the starting point. That’s not necessarily the norm, and I think that we kind of see also our, let’s call it more focal, more intuitive understanding of agency and responsibility both being reflected in the law, but then also the law kind of taking more, or other concerns also on board, for example, who has the deepest pockets or how do we want to distribute, yes, money or damages across society. So, going a little bit further than our kind of full core intuitive understandings of these things, taking more public policy concerns on board, but I do think that the two are kind of intrinsically linked absolute.
Bojan Spaić
One corollary of your discussion that is now very interesting to me, since one of my PhD students and an assistant here at the Faculty of Law, who is also involved with us in the project that we are doing, Sava Vojnović, is doing his PhD on free will and legal responsibility. But he focused, and he started focusing it on the question of determinism and legal responsibility. And with the main overarching issue there being, is there any version of determinism regarding free will, or the in existence of free will, basically, that is compatible, compatible, compatible with legal responsibility. So, I want to deduct. Yes, we’re just repeating. There is at least one word in every episode of the podcast that some of that Jules or I are completely unable to process.
Julieta Rabanos
Heavily accented philosophy of life.
Antonia Waltermann
I was just gonna say it’s perfect.
Bojan Spaić
The last time it was, I was chiming in online, and it was with Pedro. It was “deducted”.
Julieta Rabanos
It was “deduct”. We are trying to get to “deduce”.
Antonia Waltermann
Oh, I see right now it’s the part of.
Bojan Spaić
So yes, the official version was “deduct” for that.
Julieta Rabanos
OK, so, determinism.
Bojan Spaić
Yes, what do you think. Determinism. Any version compatible with legal responsibility.
Antonia Waltermann
Maybe. Yes, is my short answer. My long answer is I think the version of. Actually, I would flip it, right. I wouldn’t ask whether there’s any version of determinism that’s compatible with legal responsibility. I would ask whether there’s a version of legal responsibility that’s compatible with determinism. And then I would say absolutely there is.
But it is only sort of more consequentialist accounts of legal responsibility rather than kind of the more retributive, more Kantian kind of versions, because those, I think, are not compatible with determinism by tool.
And then I mean you do get, you know, the kind of Peter Strauss- Stone- Strauss-and, Strauss-sonian… OK, now I’m doing it as well! Peter Strawson’s argument that, you know, law is a social practice and sort of we need to presuppose certain things, whether they’re right or wrong, just to make it work. And we’re never going to get away from kind of having these kind of pro social or these kind of social attitudes towards each other, we’re never going to get away from wanting to punish or wanting to praise, but I think that, well, I have a lot of opinions on that. Let’s just say, oh, I don’t know how long we want to make this podcast episode.
Bojan Spaić
Bring it on.
Antonia Waltermann
Oh, my goodness. And yes, I tend to think of it as kind of as maps, really, as an analogy. So, I think, you know, there’s different versions. If we’re talking about compatibilism, and we’re talking about the relationship between kind of law as a social practice, or law as kind of a part, or engaged in practical reason, and the natural sciences as engaged in kind of theoretical reason, I tend to think that, you know, these are different maps.
But then if we’re looking at different maps, the question is, are there maps of the same, let’s say, city, or are they maps of two different cities? If they’re just of two different cities, then it’s not a problem if the maps don’t show the same thing, or if there’s a conflict between the maps, if you overlay them, because they’re just two different places, right? They don’t need to be compatible with each other there. But if we say that the maps are actually, you know, both sort of showing something or assuming something about reality, then they are kind of the same place.
And then they should in principle be compatible with each other, unless, you know, we have some reason to say that they don’t need to be. So, if one is, I don’t know, you know, both maps of Rome, but one is from 1800 and one is from today, OK, again if they don’t match up that’s fine. But if one is a map of, let’s take my street just to change the city up a bit, showing you know the bus system of my street, and one is a map that shows all the waterways, and suddenly there’s buses just driving all over the water, then we have a problem. Unless we can say that there is a bridge that goes over the water. So, that’s how I tend to kind of think of this.
That, you know, we need to first of all, if we’re talking about questions of compatibilism or not, we need to figure out: are they of the same? Are we talking about the same thing? Should they be compatible in the first place? Is there a need for that? I think that if we’re talking about human beings from the side of either how they’re conceived of within law, or how they’re conceived of within the natural science, that we are talking about the same thing. So, they should be compatible.
And then the next question is, are they, and if they’re not, are there other sort of the virtual bridges, if you will, so, that the buses can drive over. So, we might still have reason to say, Oh, certain parts of the law do not need to be compatible because we have compelling reasons. But I also think we should at least have the conversation about that, although I do think that that conversation is very much happening, sort of again a lot with regards to criminal law. Also, to some extent, I think in the sort of law and AI area. So, that debate, I think, is also happening, but I think it’s, yes, I’m happy about that.
Julieta Rabanos
This metaphor of the maps was really great. In my mind, it was more about, for example, what happens in physics, in the sense of like that you have these seemingly incompatible theories about how things in a sub atom field work and then the way in which like celestial bodies work, and then it seems that you cannot make this compatible, but at the same time it works if you see it in a more separate way, let’s say. So, maybe it was this was the metaphor that I was coming when you were thinking, where you were explaining about maps.
But then maybe we can take these references that we are doing to natural sciences and then think about a little more about legal reality because we naturally we are moving with these metaphors to natural reality in some sense. But then maybe we can talk a little more about legal reality, the construction of legal reality, and then the role that these non-human agents might have. Because naturally, when we were speaking about agency and we were speaking about the traditional way of thinking about agency and the way to focus on human agents, this is absolutely compatible with this common idea that law is in some sense some kind of like constructed reality, social reality. But then if you mix non-human agents in the middle of this, how does it work?
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, that’s pretty much exactly the question that I’m kind of trying to work on right now. I’m currently, sort of as we speak, I’m working on a book proposal that hopefully will be about non-human agents and the social construction of legal reality. So, this is kind of the direction I want to go in too, because I think, yes, it’s absolutely true. So, if we have sort of law as an institutionalized part of social reality, so, it is kind of socially constructed, and there too, when it comes to kind of the social construction of, well, any reality, but let’s talk about law, or any social institution, if we look at that, I think there are two, the kind of baseline assumption and the main sort of agents that we’ve looked at have been human beings.
I think within sort of social ontology there’s quite some work also on kind of group agents, corporate agents, and how those contribute to the social construction, but also how those are themselves socially constructed. But I have the impression that when it comes to that, it is still less theorized. There are definitely works that do this, but then often with regards to either specific agents or specific fields of law. So, for example, in international law, questions of how states kind of construct international law, that is something that has been worked on.
Yes, whether corporations contribute to social reality through contracts, etcetera, parliaments, certainly that’s been looked at, but what I find interesting, what I would like to do is also to look at whether we can learn something by not focusing on just one single agent, but rather taking non-human agents more generally and see what commonalities and kind of what differences arise, and whether it’s possible to have a kind of more general theory of how non-human agents contribute to the construction of legal reality.
See both in the more technical ways, and the kind of obviously, parliament contributes in a very clear and very technical manner to the construction of legal reality whenever laws are passed. But how does it work precisely? Is it again the non-human, so, is it parliament as a whole? Is it the human agents that form parliament, that are the parliamentarians? What is the role that non-human agents more specifically play in the social construction of legal reality?
And there too, how does it work given the fact that I think that we are constantly kind of taking this intentional stance to each other and to different non-human agents. What role does that play in when we assume that we’re building social institutions through, say, collective intentionality, particularly when we tend to assume that non-human agents do not have the kind of intentionality that we may need for that.
Again, I don’t necessarily agree to that. I think, you know, the question is, when do we have good reason to interpret them as having intentionality? But that’s part of, I think, what the book will need to cover and to sort of cover in that book to see how that plays out, exactly which entities, for what reasons.
Julieta Rabanos
I think that I know what Boylan is going to ask, so, I will ask another thing. Do you think that, regarding this social construction of legal reality, there might be also a difference not only naturally between maybe human agents and non-human agents, but also let’s say authoritative agents and non-authoritative agents, that can be both human and non-human in this sense.
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, I think when it comes to, especially when it comes to law, there’s a lot of, say, division of cognitive labour, if you will. You’ve seen it in Hart with kind of the role of legal officials. You’ve seen it in others as well. So, I think in that sense there is definitely kind of a division there between, now, whether we call it authoritative and non-authoritative, sufficiently important members of the society having a particular view, whatever kind of specific terminology we might want to use, I think there’s definitely a role for this kind of division of cognitive labour in the construction of social institutions and institutional reality.
Bojan Spaić
I actually wanted to go in another direction. I started thinking while you were talking about because it was the construction of social legal reality and the very, not even a metaphor, but work sometimes, like a metaphor, work sometimes, like a description of the fact that we that something is being constructed. Here’s something to do, or it has, at least in this moment in my mind, it had something to do.
This idea that he has become popular in the last 7-8 years in the work of Corrado Roversi and Luka Burazin regarding the artefactual character of law. Now there was always something about this artefactual, it’s now definitely not a metaphor about this idea of the artefactual nature of law and its natural almost relation to intention that rubbed me the wrong way for various phases.
Now when we use this metaphor, metaphor, and I’ll call the metaphors of construction, which we find is and in many other authors that were in McCormick early on, and all the other authors who have been working on social ontology, I find it much more suitable to actually describe and to relate to us what happens when a social practice, when a set of social institutions, even when a set of legal institutions arises from the complexity of the social life, for example, could you do you have any ideas on this?
How construction in this sense that you were explaining relates to this idea of artifactuality of law being produced, of social reality being produced, and so, on.
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, I think, I don’t know if this is exactly what’s been rubbing you the wrong way, but at least I’m interpreting you that way for a moment. And I think what might, the impression that might come up if we talk about sort of the social construction, or we talk about something being an artifact, is that it’s kind of deliberately made, and so, there’s a kind of active process of someone sitting down and, you know, going like, oh, I’m going to do this thing, and this will be the outcome of that thing.
I don’t think that that’s at all the case for sort of social construction of law. And at the same time, I think that law is actually perhaps to some extent and in certain cases the perfect example of that more or less kind of deliberate process. So, by and large, I don’t think that constructing or creating social reality or institutional reality is deliberate.
And this also has to do with kind of the image of you know a human being, or of us, that I tend to hold, where I think that what we’re seeing nowadays coming out of the cognitive science, what we’re seeing coming out of, say, neurosciences, is very much a picture of us: 80% of what we do is not really conscious and deliberate, there’s so, much that just happens on an unconscious level. So, I think it’s not a requirement when we talk about social facts coming into being, or when we talk about social institutions, where it shouldn’t be a requirement that there’s some kind of deliberate act.
Just sort of acquiescence to something, instantiating a practice, even if you’re not thinking about it. So, just kind of unconscious instantiations. If you’re driving, for example, you are obeying traffic rules, but at least if you’re a more experienced driver than me, you’re not really thinking about it. You’re just kind of doing a thing, but by doing the thing without thinking about it, without really conscious effort on your part, you’re still kind of instantiating a practice of obeying traffic rules on the assumption that that’s something that you do. I have not sat in the car with you, but yes, I don’t think there’s a deliberate kind of aspect necessary for the instantiation of that, and therefore for sort of creating these practices.
At the same time, I think law, at least parts of law, as the kind of institutionalized part of social reality, have in certain ways built in ways of having a more deliberate practice. So, if we’re looking at legit—if we’re looking at parliaments again, obviously I don’t want to idealize what goes on in parliament. Absolutely not. I think that’s quite a mess oftentimes, and this sort of idea that we have, this ideal that we have, of sort of very, you know, rational debate in parliament, is not something that corresponds to reality, but it is still a way of kind of having some kind of moment of reflection in some kind of way, shape or form, and of having different interests represented and different reasons put forward.
So in that specific sense, and only there, I think law actually is perhaps one of the social institutions that does have a kind of deliberate creative element, rather than this kind of very unconscious, you don’t even need to think about it, sort of almost natural arising out of the complexity of the social as you called it. But I think that’s the sort of specific circumstance or specific set, whereas by and large, I don’t think there’s any deliberate effort being required. There’s no kind of intentional fuel for that’s necessary for the creation of an artifact.
Bojan Spaić
It’s fantastic to hear as all of a sudden, I started thinking whether you would consider my driving and association of following traffic rules. I’m not absolutely, absolutely, I’m not absolutely sure about that. So, but hopefully I instantiate traffic rules. But what you bring up is an interesting point for me in this, also in another sense, but I want push much on that. This is definitely close to my intuitions about it, in the sense that there is something deliberate about these acts of creating laws.
Let’s, if not within acts of creating law in general, or creating a system of law, or creating this, all these social institutions that work in order to make law possible, but also this, you topple to the other side, so, you have these sets or systems or networks of social processes bringing us to a point in which the legislation adopts a law deliberately, or in a certain, or at least procedurally, deliberately. Then you again fall on the other side in which you’re practically seeding something into that social life. And it’s kind of you can stir it in a certain direction, but it really depends all on how this social life that exists, how there is construed, how people will react to it, what will be the interpretation by the people of it, and so, on and so, on.
I was thinking mostly about this, but I’m making it a long story. Worry now by talking to some friends who are dentists, and which is a funny way of kind of looking at it, because I was asking them basically, and then after I found even some studies regarding this same thing, how much of law do we actually know by being acquainted with it directly. None of the dentists knew a single thing about the ethical regulations, legal regulations of their profession. If they knew something, that was all completely, completely based on their moral notions, social notions, submitted it to other persons and so, on and so, on.
So, kind of this moment in which a law is intentionally produced quickly dissolves into something that again doesn’t have any relation to intention when you throw it in social life.
Antonia Waltermann
I wonder whether sort of, oh, but I tend to think, but I have not done sufficient research on this, so, this is sort of my intuition at the moment, is that the way it kind of works is that, you know, we tend to, I think we’re not necessarily, but oftentimes we, I think, also tend to assume that following the law and kind of obeying rules is also kind of a deliberate thing.
That, you know, there’s a kind of like, there’s an awareness. We know what the rules are, and then we’re like, oh, we’re going to follow the law because that’s the law. So, we have a kind of conscious, deliberate effort there. Whereas I think that’s probably not at all the case in your dentist example, and I think also the driving example nicely kind of illustrates that you’re not busy with thinking about following the law at all most of the time.
And also, for concluding a contract, I think most of us are not even thinking about the fact that if you buy something in the supermarket, that’s a contract, and you know you’ve just legally bound yourself to pay that much money in exchange for these go. But rather, you know, because the rules exist, certain practices start to exist, and then we internalize those practices. And so, through our internalization, we then act in accordance with them, and through acting in accordance with them, even though we don’t do it deliberately, we still instantiate them, but I think a lot of that happens kind of below the surface.
And I think as lawyers, sure, and then certainly as legal theorists, we’re the kind of people that, you know, actively engage with the law and with the legal rules, and that we, we’re the ones who can very consciously and deliberately think about them. But I think in actual kind of social reality, institutionalized reality, legal reality on the ground, that is not something that really happens.
And at the same time it works not because people are actively thinking about this, but because through the existence of rules we have created certain practices that people have internalized, and so, people act in accordance with that without even thinking about it.
Bojan Spaić
And the rest is social psychology, basically. So, I usually conclude this. I completely agree with you, and you come to this and you say so. I behave in a certain way, and the rest is social psychology in the sense conformity and all these things. The social psychology does.
Antonia Waltermann
Pretty much yes.
Julieta Rabanos
Oh, I am extremely sympathetic with this in the sense of like, also my intuitions are in this direction, and the things that I have been seeing, for example in studies, also go in this direction. There is a fantastic paper called the Emotional Dog and this rational tale that.
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, I like that.
Julieta Rabanos
One, yes, exactly. When I was doing my PhD research, I talked about my intuitions to this professor called Bruno Celano, and he was like, I think that you should read this paper because I think that you will like it. I think that it goes in maybe the same direction. And I read it, it was like, yes, like epiphany in this sense.
And I think, so, circle back to something that we were already discussing, like intention, free will, if there are good reasons to ascribe intention, blah blah blah, I think that it follows naturally that maybe the discussion that we might have is like moving away from the question whether intention or free will exist, but whether we need to presuppose that they exist under certain conditions. And I think that you were also going back to that when you were starting to also explain your stand on non-human agents, or the possibility of non-human agents.
Antonia Waltermann
Yes. So, I tend to think, I mean obviously, you know, we need to be very, very careful with sort of definitions. What exactly do we need with free will, what exactly do we mean with intentionality, etcetera. But by and large, I tend to think that free will in the kind of libertarian sense does not exist.
At the same time, I also don’t think that, you know, anyone could ever have done otherwise. I also don’t think that, you know, agents exist in a sense that’s kind of out there independently of us. Rather, I think that agency, responsibility, intentionality, these are things that we ascribe. These are things that we ascribe to each other, so, it’s not a question of kind of like, Oh,, the law needs to track sort of some kind of reality that exists outside of the law, what that exists outside of our social kind of practices, but rather our social practices, including but not limited to law, kind of create agents, create responsibility, and create intentionality.
So, I think that by and large this is a matter of description and attribution, and if that’s the case, then indeed the question is: when? Well, one question is when do we do that? And that is very much a question, I think, of more than social psychology, and that is the kind of question. So, there’s already papers on, you know, under what circumstances do we take the intentional stance to humanoid looking robots or works? On, you know, if you put triangle, square, like geometrical forms on a computer screen and you have them act in a certain, like you have to move in a certain way, people will interpret that as intentional behaviour. The square is chasing the triangle and the circle is protecting. So, there there’s definitely studies on when we do that. I think there’s also studies on why we, as a matter of fact, with art.
But I think especially when it comes to law and legal theory, the question is also, and obviously to philosophy, the question is also when should we do it? When do we have good reasons to do it? And there we’re going back to precisely law is something that creates practices, that creates agents, and to some extent law has the possibility of to do so, deliberately. So, I think there’s a good kind of reason there to look at legal theory and to have legal theoretical reasoning about which agents do we have good reasons to create within the law, and what are those reasons.
And one of those agents is human beings. I think we create human beings as natural persons in the law. I mean, that’s a very classical calcination point. And I think he was right about.
Julieta Rabanos
Like the centre of imputation of norms.
Antonia Waltermann
Exactly.
Julieta Rabanos
I completely agree, and I think that it is also something that we have as a departing point to think, because if you construct a legal personhood in this way, naturally you can put inside the centre of imputation of norms whatever you want, which might be a physical person, which might be a physical human being, or whatever you can put. Like an institution, you can put nature, you can put whatever you want, but it’s exactly the same schema.
Antonia Waltermann
Absolutely. And there this is what I find so, interesting because on this reading, the kinds of agents that law creates are up to law, are up to our question of what legal rules exist, what legal institutions do we implement? Same for questions of responsibility or legal liability, the kinds of agents that we can hold liable within the law, that is something that is up to essentially legislators. But at the same time, there are agents that are creating law.
So rather than agents that are being created by law, there’s also agents that are creating law. Human beings are obviously one of them. But yes, we’ve also touched on parliaments as a big example, I think states are a big example, but if we’re talking about the creation of law, so, I think also perhaps, yes, if a corporation is pushing for a particular interpretation of a constitution, a statute, what have you, are they not kind of co creating how we will actually interpret that in social reality?
So these agents are created by law, they’re part, they’re created by a kind of legal reality, or they’re part of legal reality because they’ve been constructed. But at the same time, they’ve become kind of co constructors, and this kind of back and forth, or this kind of self-referential character, I find really, really interesting as well.
So how does that work? It’s obviously not just a question of temporality, but rather these different kinds of levels of social reality interacting with each other. Yes, like I’m very fascinated by this, which is probably why I decided I’d read the Book of Moses.
Bojan Spaić
What comes to mind is you’re mentioning that these subjects, let’s say, that create law, that none of these subject is a central case of something having mental states, intentions, or states, or internal states whatsoever nowadays, but then you, when you connected with the idea that the judges are especially stubborn about, for example, the most stubborn idea of law might be the will of the legislator. This idea of the will of the legislator, it goes well hand in hand with your idea that there is something that basically forces us to presuppose this, even in sprites on a computer screen. Sometimes when they behave in a certain way, you just kind of, like the way this idea persisted, all the mutations that actually completely expelled anything that you could call a clear will from the process of creation of law, in the sense that it’s collective agents, it is institutional agents, it is parliaments, it is multi member bodies.
It is basically, there is not one single thing in law that is done on the general level, that is done by one person willing a thing.
Antonia Waltermann
I mean, even if we find an example of that, right, we have not yet been able to find the place in the brain that is the mental state, right? so, even if we were to find an example of this and we were to, I don’t know, put that person into an MRI at the time that they’re making the legal decision or creating the law, I think we’d still not be able to find the mental state of intentionality in that sense, or at least we haven’t yet.
And so, by necessity, even if we take all the philosophical argument out of it and all the, you know, corporate agents, group agents, etcetera, or the collective intentionality, right, we can only look, if that, we can only look into our own heads, and even there whether introspection gives us any real insight is another question. But I mean, we’re constantly looking at outside manifestations of what we take to be mental states.
If you say, yes, I agree, and that concludes our contract, I haven’t seen your mental state. I haven’t seen an intention to be legally bound by this contract in your head. I’ve just seen an outside manifestation of that.
Bojan Spaić
Well, hopefully at one point my long-standing idea to hook up Serbian judges to MRI will be realized. Somebody will recognize the genius of hooking people after their eyes and just studying the hell out of them.
Antonia Waltermann
Yes, I think this might be the right time to kind of do that kind of research. That’s definitely more and more happening in kind of like law and neuroscience, neural, so, sort of things. It’s a field nowadays, I think.
Bojan Spaić
The breaking point for me when I saw this, they have MRI machines in which you can sit. You don’t have to lay down. Then everything is sold. I mean.
Antonia Waltermann
Oh, I always liked the lying down. That’s like a little break, bit noisy, but at least you get to chill for a while.
Julieta Rabanos
Well, but it’s kind of psychologist.
Antonia Waltermann
You would take the dignity out of the proceedings.
Bojan Spaić
It takes some dignity, but like this authoritative part, maybe Jules could say something about like it kind of reduces the authority of the issuing body.
Julieta Rabanos
Oh. I think that it will depend on what type of dystopia we’re talking. Like the judge in this cylindrical thing. Yes, exactly.
Antonia Waltermann
Oh.
Bojan Spaić
Don’t see anything dystopian about this.
Antonia Waltermann
I’ve seen it before. Me. No, I have a picture in my head now. I have a picture in my head.
Julieta Rabanos
I also see it. Yes, exactly. Now minority report thing. But with judges. Yes, exactly.
Bojan Spaić
Exactly should at least be a movie.
Antonia Waltermann
Tools. And I thought that I was just thinking someone should write a TV show about this. I nominate you, Jules.
Julieta Rabanos
Yes, but let’s slide to the last part of this episode, which is connected to all the things that we have already discussing and something that you introduced at the very beginning of the episode, which is education. So, basically, when we were talking about social construction of legal reality, and then we were talking naturally about agency and human agency, but especially non-human agency. But then I think that it might be worth it to ask you about your stand in regard to the importance of education, especially legal education of the possible participants that construct these social reality, this law. So, what do you think about it?
Antonia Waltermann
Yes. So, thanks for asking this cause, so, if we think back to what I was saying about kind of internalizing norms, I think this is precisely where education kind of kicks in.
So, I guess it’s a metaphor. I read this in a book on mathematics where a math professor was talking about how no one wants to do math because it’s like, what does this mean for us in real life? We’re never going to do this again, etcetera, etcetera. And he said he’s always dreamt about replying to this, it’s an American author, sort of picking on an American kind of football player in the room and kind of saying, do you ever lift weights? And then of course, the American football player will be like, yes, of course I do. We do that in training all the time. And then asking, well, on the field when you’re actually playing a game, do you lift weights on the field? And of course, the answer will be no, you don’t. OK, so, you’re not doing it when you’re playing a game, so, why’d you do it? Well, because it makes me stronger.
And then the kind of conclusion that this math professor drew is like, yes, mathematics is kind of weightlifting for your brain. And I think that legal theory actually does a similar thing in legal education. So, for example, we train legal reasoning. And there is, so, the way that we tend to do it in the states is that, you know, we make them analyse what are the conditions of a rule, are sort of cumulative conditions, are there alternative conditions, what’s the legal consequence, and there’s this process they have to go through.
And of course, if you’re standing in front of a judge, eventually arguing, or if you’re going to make some kind of legal decision, whether that’s about obeying the speed limit or anything, you’re not going to do that process. But by having practiced that process, you kind of train yourself to better see that there are conditions, what those conditions are, and you kind of internalize and you start becoming able to do it automatically and unthinkingly, the way that a chess master can walk past the chess board and without having to analyse the position just say this is the next move and then you win. Whereas a novice really needs to kind of look at it and deliberately kind of analyse it.
So, I think education has an important role in this movement from kind of deliberate practice and having to think about things, having to reflect on things, and having to really sort of work at it, to things just becoming kind of internalized and becoming kind of automatically able to do things. So, kind of an unconscious competence, rather than a kind of deliberate working at compete. Oops.
So I think there’s a lot of room there, certainly for legal education, but also for questions of, you know, doing ethics and doing legal theory in legal education, because it’s this kind of weightlifting for your brain, if you will, or this kind of weightlifting for your ethical compass, and I think that’s something that’s very much necessary.
And yes, one reason that I’m happy that we’re back on the topic of legal education or education in general as well is that right now in the Netherlands, there’s a, well, I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that this is a far right government at the moment who are planning to cut about a billion of the funds of universities, just roughly the size of one big or two small universities in this country, and it’s not a big country to begin with.
So, I think I really want to emphasize that I think having education and having this kind of education that forces you to practice thinking and to practice also working with reasons and working with rules is hugely important. Because I think the alternative, and that’s something that I think we do in law, this practice of, you know, what is the rule and does this work with the rule, what’s the underlying value and is this compatible with that?
The alternative I think to that is that we just all end up with kind of gut instinct decision making that doesn’t correspond to any kind of practice, rules theorizing, all values. So, I think it’s really important that this kind of internalization process happens, but also that it happens in, you know, a reasonable way. So, I think education kind of does that, and I think that’s quite important.
Yes, that was my little rant about education and against the budget cuts. There’ll be a huge protest in the Netherlands next Monday, so, we’re kind of taking to the streets. I think it takes a lot to get academics into the streets, but yes, this is just something I feel quite strongly about. So, I think that, yes, I did want to take a minute just to emphasize that I think education and legal education and legal theoretical education is very important.
Bojan Spaić
To give you a bit of encouragement, we managed this, so, Serbia has been struggling with government that is kind of has very, very high authoritarian tendencies in the last 12 years, and for some reason or another, the university has for the most part been left out of this huge, huge willingness and huge efforts to kind of swallow the entirety of the Serbian society by the government and the parties in the government.
But in the last couple of weeks there has been a huge push to amend the law on higher education in order to include a pretty bizarre provision that would allow foreign, some foreign universities without accreditation, and based on the discretion of the minister of higher education, to start educating people in Serbia, being financed by the government, and the pushback from the academic community was pretty decisive, pretty long, and pretty loud.
And I’m very happy to report that this pushback resulted in the fact that the amendment was withdrawn from the procedure this morning, on the dismay of the government. So, one can in fact succeed, and I hope certainly that you will be able to push again, to push against these efforts because they kind of they get you into this weird position in which you have to justify something that is like, I was always thinking like those middle in the Middle Ages when you, Scott said Eugene, I was writing the ontological argument in favour of God.
There was a teacher, a philosopher in Serbia who had this, his book was used in the high school when I was studying, and he always was there, this interesting sentence when he asks, I’m not really sure, why did he feel the need to give an ontological argument in favour of God when everybody already believed in God, that nobody was questioning that. So, it’s very difficult when somebody puts you in this position in which they say, OK, now justify education.
Antonia Waltermann
Yes. You would think not, but clearly yes.
Bojan Spaić
Yes, in the last, in the last like couple of papers even started thinking about this thing that you were, I think completely rightly emphasizing that there is this quasi-technical calling to philosophy of law and things we do. I mean when you learn legal and when you teach legal reasoning.
It’s not like when you’re teaching your kid to ride a bike and he eventually makes the mistakes, but one has to know about wheels. One has to know about movement, what has to be aware about. And I always like that thing like you can leave it to God instinct until a problem emerges. So, my concept of theory was always a bit of a pragmatic concept of theory, kind of. You need a theory of a key lock and a door. You don’t need it all in all these times.
And you can easily open the door by using your key. But the first time when you can’t open the door by using your key, you are definitely prompted to theorize about it and to come up with some possible solutions. Theoretical solutions, ways of solving this problem.
Julieta Rabanos
So basically, if it works, why touch it? Yes, which is not your approach.
Bojan Spaić
Yes, but absolutely not. But then I think pathological. Fair enough. Fair enough. I consider this a pathology as far as I go, and the theoretical things not so, much in this. But yes, I get you.
Antonia Waltermann
The world of sin, pathological in our love for philosophy.
Julieta Rabanos
May well be the case. But I think that there was a discussion on a thread in social networks in which it was not a discussion, it was a professor saying that she was doing Duolingo and Duolingo at some point pointed her to the, is he a professor or is he crazy or something on the likes, and she was like those are non-exclusive things.
Why so? And I would say in that maybe craziness or something on the like was a typical feature of people of the class of professor, let’s say that.
Bojan Spaić
There is a Marvel hero and hero from being human series that’s called Karnak. Karnak is, it’s my favourite Marvel character. It’s completely obscure. It just might have a series or something like that, but the tag line for Karnak, I see the floor in all things. That’s the tag line. So, that’s the kind of my baseline, unfortunately, unfortunately for my internal life.
But this was a I love this conversation, and it really has prompted me to think and rethink while you were talking, and also for unfortunately for the listeners out loud for quite long about my comments, so, they can read think these things regarding making agency, free will, determinism, social construct, social reality, and artefactual character flow. So, I thank you so, much for joining us in this podcast. It was wonderful for me and hopefully you had an.
Antonia Waltermann
I definitely did. Thank you so, much for having me and for letting me kind of ramble on these topics. Yes, sometimes I wonder whether this is just sort of my interest in my head or whether this makes sense. And so, it’s really, really good to be able to share my thoughts with you and with the listeners. So, I’m really happy that I got this opportunity. Thank you so, much.
Julieta Rabanos
Oh, thank you, and I think that this is like the basis of how knowledge is built, in the sense of like in the changing these things that are in our minds, that maybe that they don’t, they seem to make sense, but we don’t know, and then we make them explicit and then we see talking about expectations.
Antonia Waltermann
Of other people, I tend to think that’s kind of what science does now. It’s this kind of communal process. If someone articulates something, someone points out a problem, but you can change your stance a little bit, you adapt your fiddle and hopefully eventually come up with something that is accurate and that works.
Bojan Spaić
And all the better when it’s so, pleasant and fun like it was for me today. So, thank you Antonia.
Antonia Waltermann
Much thank you.
(*some minor grammatical and changes have been introduced in order to make the reading more fluid, but in no way altering the content or the format of each speaker’s interventions).
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