How should automated vehicles react in emergency circumstances? Most research projects and scientific literature deal with this question from a moral perspective. In particular, it is customary to treat emergencies involving AVs as instances of moral dilemmas and to use the trolley problem as a framework to address such alleged dilemmas. Some critics have pointed out some shortcomings of this strategy and have urged to focus on mundane traffic situations instead of trolley cases involving AVs. Besides, these authors rightly point (...) out the political nature of the most interesting debates involving AVs. However, in our view, they do not offer an adequate account of the distinction between ethics and politics and still see their proposals as contributions to the ethics of AVs. We argue that many of the interesting questions about how AVs should behave, both in emergency and other situations, are of political, and not moral, nature. This view is based on a conception of politics and political normativity that we have developed elsewhere and that we call “political minimalism.” Additionally, we show that this proposed perspective has significant consequences for the design, management, and regulation of transport systems. (shrink)

I argue for the distinction between presuming that p and maintaining that presumably p. In order to make sense of this distinction, I defend a non-inferentialist conception of presumptions and offer an account of the correctness conditions for both presumptions and presumptive inferences. I characterize presumptions as a type of constative speech-act having certain semantic correctness conditions. In turn, regarding presumptive inferences, my strategy is to provide the correctness conditions for the use of an epistemic modal such as “presumably.” This (...) epistemic modal is characterized as a force indicator for speech-acts of concluding in complex speech-acts of arguing involving presumptive inferences. (shrink)

Following a Toulmian account of argument analysis and evaluation, I offer a general unitary schema for, so called, deductive and inductive types of analogical arguments. This schema is able to explain why certain analogical arguments can be said to be deductive, and yet, also defeasible.

According to political minimalism, a debate is considered political when it revolves around the question “What shall we do?” This account suggests that certain issues related to human enhancement technologies (HETs), which have traditionally been addressed in the realm of applied ethics, could be better approached from a political standpoint. However, this raises the question of who constitutes the “we” – the communities that face the political challenges posed by HETs. We argue that there is a global human community that (...) directly faces at least some of these challenges, and this fact underscores the relevance of a cosmopolitan perspective. While some authors have already advocated for a cosmopolitan approach in addressing issues such as poverty or climate change, they often do so from a moral outlook, without adequately distinguishing between ethics and politics. In contrast, we assert that HETs present compelling arguments in favour of cosmopolitanism as a political stance. In support of this claim, we consider two cases: the pills that would allow people to eat at will without gaining weight, and the choice between different types of cognitive enhancers. (shrink)

Both because of the vagueness of the word ‘give’ when speaking about giving reasons, and because we lack an adequate definition of ‘reasons’, there is a harmful ambiguity in the expression ‘giving reasons’. Particularly, straightforwardly identifying argumentation with reasons giving would make of virtually any interplay a piece of argumentation. Besides, if we adopt the mainstream definition of reasons as “considerations that count in favour of doing or believing something”, then only good argumentation would count as argumentation. In this paper, (...) I defend a qualified characterization of argumentation as reasons giving that is shown to be fruitful for shedding light on the practice of giving reasons, and an inferentialist conception of reasons that makes room for speaking of “bad reasons” and, consequently, makes it possible to talk of argumentation as reasons giving even if we are talking about bad argumentation. (shrink)

Both because of the vagueness of the word ‘give’ when speaking about giving reasons, and because we lack an adequate definition of ‘reasons’, there is a harmful ambiguity in the expression ‘giving reasons’. Particularly, straightforwardly identifying argumentation with reasons giving would make of virtually any interplay a piece of argumentation. Besides, if we adopt the mainstream definition of reasons as “considerations that count in favour of doing or believing something”, then only good argumentation would count as argumentation. In this paper, (...) I defend a qualified characterization of argumentation as reasons giving that is shown to be fruitful for shedding light on the practice of giving reasons, and an inferentialist conception of reasons that makes room for speaking of “bad reasons” and, consequently, makes it possible to talk of argumentation as reasons giving even if we are talking about bad argumentation. (shrink)

a recent paper, Fábio Perin Shecaira proposes a defence of Waller’s deductivist schema for moral analogical argumentation. This defence has several flaws, the most important of them being that many good analogical arguments would be deemed bad or deficient. Additionally, Shecaira misrepresents my alternative account as something in between deductivism and non-deductivism. This paper is both an attempt at solving this misunderstanding and an analysis and criticism of Waller and Shecaira’s forms of deductivism.

Our aim is to defend the Precautionary Principle (PP) against the main theoretical and practical criticisms that it has raised by proposing a novel conception and a specific formulation of the principle. We first address the theoretical concerns against the idea of there being a principle of precaution by arguing for a distinctively political conception of the PP as opposed to a moral one. Our claim is that the rationale of the PP is grounded in the fact that contemporary societies (...) wish to avoid morally unacceptable risks while at the same time pursuing other goals, aspirations and values. Following this political conception of the PP, we propose a specific formulation in terms of an argumentation scheme—the Argumentation Scheme for Appealing to Precaution—which is meant to solve, in turn, the main practical concerns that the PP has raised. We explain the advantages of our proposal by analysing appeals to precaution in the cases of (1) the European restrictions on the free movement of persons during the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) the discharge of nuclear wastes into the Irish Sea. (shrink)

I defend a conception of Logic as normative for the sort of activities in which inferences super-vene, namely, reasoning and arguing. Toulmin’s criticism of formal logic will be our framework to shape the idea that in order to make sense of Logic as normative, we should con-ceive it as a discipline devoted to the layout of arguments, understood as the representations of the semantic, truth relevant, properties of the inferences that we make in arguing and reason-ing.

In “Deductivism as an Interpretative Strategy: A Reply to Groarke’s Defense of Reconstructive Deductivism,” David Godden distinguished two notions of deductivism. On the one hand, as an interpretative thesis, deductivism is the view that all-natural language argumentation must be interpreted as being deductive. On the other hand, as an evaluative thesis, deductivism is the view that for a conclusion to follow, it has to follow of necessity from the premises—or, in other words, that being a good inference implies being deductive. (...) The main goal of this paper is to show that evaluative deductivism is wrong. (shrink)

Hample, Paglieri, and Na’s model of argument engagement proposes that people en-gage in arguments when they perceive the benefits of arguing to be greater than the costs of doing so. This paper tests the model in Romania, a different culture than the one in which the model was developed, by using a 2 x 2 design.

I propose a characterization of the dialectical dimension of argumentation by considering the activity of arguing as involving a “second order intersubjectivity”. I argue that argumentative communication enables this kind of intersubjectivity as a matter of the recursive nature of acts of arguing—both as justificatory and as persuasive devices. Calling attention to this feature is a way to underline that argumentative discourses represent the explicit part of a dynamic activity, “a mechanism of rational validation”, as Rescher showed, which is a (...) practice that presupposes the possibility of attaining objectivity. (shrink)

I argue that conductions are a special type of inference indeed, but that this does not mean that we need to develop novel standards of inference goodness or specific argument schemes for properly assessing them. Following LNMA’s theoretical framework, I provide a semantic account of conductions and explain the interesting pragmatic properties of a certain type of conductions in terms of the rhetorical dimension of the speech-act of arguing.

In Giving Reasons: A Linguistic-pragmatic-approach to Argumentation Theory (Springer, 2011), I provide a new model for the semantic and pragmatic appraisal of argumentation. This model is based on a characterization of argumentation as a second order speech-act complex. I explain the advantages of this model respecting other proposals within Argumentation Theory, such as Pragma-dialectics, Informal Logic, the New Rhetoric or the Epistemic Approach.

I characterize the deductivist ideal of justification and, following to a great extent Toulmin’s work The Uses of Argument, I try to explain why this ideal is erroneous. Then I offer an alternative model of justification capable of making our claims to knowledge about substantial matters sound and reasonable. This model of justification will be based on a conception of justification as the result of good argumentation, and on a model of argumentation which is a pragmatic linguistic reconstruction of Toulmin’s (...) model of argument. (shrink)

RESUMEN: El uso de analogías en bioética es muy frecuente. Dado que son instrumentos especialmente eficaces desde un punto de vista retórico, resulta fundamental determinar bajo qué condiciones la formulación de analogías constituye un recurso discursivo legítimo. En este artículo, distinguimos entre usos no-discursivos y usos discursivos de las analogías, y dentro de estos últimos, entre usos explicativos y usos argumentativos. En base a esta clasificación, proponemos distintos conjuntos de criterios para determinar si una analogía particular constituye un recurso discursivo (...) legítimo o no. Para ello, ilustramos brevemente nuestra clasificación mediante algunos ejemplos tomados del reciente debate sobre los biobancos.ABSTRACT: Analogies are frequently used in bioethics. As they are particularly effective as rhetorical tools, it is essential to determine under which conditions they can be said to be a legitimate discursive resource. In this paper we distinguish between nondiscursive uses and discursive uses of analogies and, within the latter, between explanatory uses and argumentative uses. Taking this classification as a basis, we provide different sets of criteria for determining whether or not a particular analogy constitutes a legitimate discursive resource. In distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate analogies, we briefly illustrate our classification by some examples from recent literature on biobanks. (shrink)

RESUMEN: El uso de analogías en bioética es muy frecuente. Dado que son instrumentos especialmente eficaces desde un punto de vista retórico, resulta fundamental determinar bajo qué condiciones la formulación de analogías constituye un recurso discursivo legítimo. En este artículo, distinguimos entre usos no-discursivos y usos discursivos de las analogías, y dentro de estos últimos, entre usos explicativos y usos argumentativos. En base a esta clasificación, proponemos distintos conjuntos de criterios para determinar si una analogía particular constituye un recurso discursivo (...) legítimo o no. Para ello, ilustramos brevemente nuestra clasificación mediante algunos ejemplos tomados del reciente debate sobre los biobancos.ABSTRACT: Analogies are frequently used in bioethics. As they are particularly effective as rhetorical tools, it is essential to determine under which conditions they can be said to be a legitimate discursive resource. In this paper we distinguish between nondiscursive uses and discursive uses of analogies and, within the latter, between explanatory uses and argumentative uses. Taking this classification as a basis, we provide different sets of criteria for determining whether or not a particular analogy constitutes a legitimate discursive resource. In distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate analogies, we briefly illustrate our classification by some examples from recent literature on biobanks. (shrink)

From 26th to 28th of April 2016, it took place in the University of Granada a conference on presumptions, presumptive inferences and burdens of proof that, joint with other ongoing initiatives, has contributed to renew the interest of the argumentation community in analysing these notions and the relationships between them. This special volume of Argumentation consists of a selection of papers presented at this conference.

I distinguish four current strategies for integrating a rhetorical perspective within normative models for argumentation. Then I propose and argue for a fifth one by defending a conception of acts of arguing as having a rhetorical dimension that provides conditions for characterizing good argumentation, understood as argumentation that justifies a target-claim.