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This paper provides an inferentialist motivation for a logic belonging in the connexive family, by borrowing elements from the bilateralist interpretation for Classical Logic without the Cut rule, proposed by David Ripley. The paper focuses on the relation between inferentialism and relevance, through the exploration of what we call relevant assertion and denial, showing that a connexive system emerges as a symptom of this interesting link. With the present attempt we hope to broaden the available interpretations for connexive logics, showing they can be rightfully motivated in terms of certain relevantist constraints imposed on assertion and denial.

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The aim of this paper is to provide a philosophical interpretation of bilateralism in terms of probabilism. In particular, to interpret the main concepts of bilateralism –acceptance, rejection and incoherence– in terms of the probabilistic notions of degree of belief and coherence. According to bilateralism, the meaning of logical connectives is determined by the acceptance and rejection conditions of the sentences in which they are involved, where acceptance and rejection cannot be reduced to one another. I will focus on a variant of bilateralism that understands logical consequence as the statement that it is incoherent to accept all the premises of a valid argument while rejecting all its conclusions. On the other hand, probabilism states that it is possible to interpret our degrees of belief in terms of probabilities. The aim of this work is then to interpret the concept of incoherence in terms of probability functions and determine when it is coherent to accept or to reject a proposition according to some threshold defined in terms of degrees of belief. To achieve this goal, we need both an interpretation of the concept of incoherence coined by the bilateralists as well as an interpretation of acceptance and rejection. I will show that a good interpretation of coherence in probabilistic terms can already be found in the literature. Then, I will give an interpretation of acceptance and rejection in terms of degrees of belief. In particular, I will show that it is possible to interpret these concepts in accordance with Locke’s thesis, the thesis that states that there is some threshold r such that if you believe some sentence in degree equal or higher than r you should accept it, without falling into epistemic paradoxes.

This paper examines the reasons why Japan has been building a foreign trade policy based on a hub-and-spokes system. It will be argued that trade efficiency and exports promotion are assumptions that need a broader reconsideration through a geo-economics approach. What defines Japan’s pursuit of several bilateral trade agreements is assuring its relative economic hegemony whilst changes in the world balance of power are taking place. As Japan faces an uncertain and unforeseeable future, it needs to strengthen its trade policy to guarantee access to international markets. Japan’s trade policy goes beyond the efficiency scope and it entails a geo-economics elucidation.

The vast majority of the world’s biological resources and traditional knowledge is located in the developing world, yet the vast majority of the world’s intellectual property over biotechnology is owned by the developed world. Since the formation of the WTO the developing world has supported the developed world’s demands for stronger intellectual property protection. However, as it now seeks the support of the developed world to exploit these resources, it finds that the developed world has only responded with overtures of bilateralism. Furthermore, the expected increases in foreign direct investment have not materialised, yet have continued to flow to China, a country that is the world’s largest producer of counterfeit goods. In this paper, Luigi Palombi discusses TRIPS, post-TRIPS bilateralism and patents in the context of biological resources and traditional knowledge and seeks to provide a solution to the present intellectual property deadlock between the developed and developing worlds.