Whatever the virtue of those rules, the fact that few people, in or out of the S.E.C., were consulted before they were issued led to a series of amendments and made the commission appear disorganized.
There certainly is some truth to that claim: the gasbags (Limbaugh, Palin et al) emit more heat and fire but burn out more easily, while simply by virtue of institutional rules he played a more active legislative role in the past two years than did John Boehner.
One kind of statement was cognitively analytic, that is, a class of the statements that were true or false by virtue of the rules of language.
It is fair to say that approach 3 became predominant in the 14th century, the golden age of medieval theories of consequence; but the earlier Boethian view that all valid arguments (including syllogistic arguments) are valid in virtue of topical rules can also be seen as belonging to category 3.
Yet, in the logical positivist account, since most moral statements do not appear to be true or false by virtue of the rules of language or to be verifiable in the way in which statements are verifiable in the experimental sciences, they must be understood as expressions of emotive attitude.
Even if moral properties were identical with, or supervened upon, these rule-of-law properties, they do so in virtue of their rule-like character, and not their law-like character.
Note that, because theorems involve neither constants nor free variables in Kripke's system, the Rule of Generalization has no purchase; any quantifier prefixed to a theorem in virtue of the rule would be vacuous (and hence could be inferred from the easily provable theorem ⌈φ → ∀αφ⌉, for α not occurring free in φ).
More than that, there is a suggestion that it is in virtue of the syntactical rules that the unarticulated semantic relations between the words are expressed.
Following the final week of the regular season, both Virginia Tech and Boston College earned their berths in the championship game by virtue of tie-breaking rules that selected the two teams by virtue of head-to-head wins over their compatriots.
He described both the cardinal virtues and the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, but he did not feel the tension that current virtue ethicists sometimes feel between virtue and the following of rules or principles.
