Informal logicians recognise the frequent use of unstated assumptions; some (e.g. Fisher) also recognise entertained arguments and recommend a suppositional approach (such as Mackie's) to conditional statements. It is here argued that these two be put together to make argument diagrams more accurate and subtle. Philosophical benefits also accrue: insights into Jackson's apparent violations of modus tollens and contraposition and McGee's counterexamples to the validity of modus ponens.

This book brings together in one place David Hitchcock’s most significant published articles on reasoning and argument. In seven new chapters he updates his thinking in the light of subsequent scholarship. Collectively, the papers articulate a distinctive position in the philosophy of argumentation. Among other things, the author:• develops an account of “material consequence” that permits evaluation of inferences without problematic postulation of unstated premises.• updates his recursive definition of argument that accommodates chaining and embedding of arguments and (...) allows any type of illocutionary act to be a conclusion. • advances a general theory of relevance.• provides comprehensive frameworks for evaluating inferences in reasoning by analogy, means-end reasoning, and appeals to considerations or criteria.• argues that none of the forms of arguing ad hominem is a fallacy.• describes proven methods of teaching critical thinking effectively. (shrink)

The aim of this investigation is to explore the role of argumentation schemes in enthymeme reconstruction. This aim is pursued by studying selected cases of incomplete arguments in natural language discourse to see what the requirements are for filling in the unstated premises and conclusions in some systematic and useful way. Some of these cases are best handled using deductive tools, while others respond best to an analysis based on defeasible argumentations schemes. The approach is also shown to (...) work reasonably well for weak arguments, a class of arguments that has always been difficult to analyze without the principle of charity producing a straw man. (shrink)

Argumentation mining is an application of natural language processing (NLP) that emerged a few years ago and has recently enjoyed considerable popularity, as demonstrated by a series of international workshops and by a rising number of publications at the major conferences and journals of the field. Its goals are to identify argumentation in text or dialogue; to construct representations of the constellation of claims, supporting and attacking moves (in different levels of detail); and to characterize the patterns of reasoning that (...) appear to license the argumentation. Furthermore, recent work also addresses the difficult tasks of evaluating the persuasiveness and quality of arguments. Some of the linguistic genres that are being studied include legal text, student essays, political discourse and debate, newspaper editorials, scientific writing, and others. The book starts with a discussion of the linguistic perspective, characteristics of argumentative language, and their relationship to certain other notions such as subjectivity. Besides the connection to linguistics, argumentation has for a long time been a topic in Artificial Intelligence, where the focus is on devising adequate representations and reasoning formalisms that capture the properties of argumentative exchange. It is generally very difficult to connect the two realms of reasoning and text analysis, but we are convinced that it should be attempted in the long term, and therefore we also touch upon some fundamentals of reasoning approaches. Then the book turns to its focus, the computational side of mining argumentation in text. We first introduce a number of annotated corpora that have been used in the research. From the NLP perspective, argumentation mining shares subtasks with research fields such as subjectivity and sentiment analysis, semantic relation extraction, and discourse parsing. Therefore, many technical approaches are being borrowed from those (and other) fields. We break argumentation mining into a series of subtasks, starting with the preparatory steps of classifying text as argumentative (or not) and segmenting it into elementary units. Then, central steps are the automatic identification of claims, and finding statements that support or oppose the claim. For certain applications, it is also of interest to compute a full structure of an argumentative constellation of statements. Next, we discuss a few steps that try to 'dig deeper': to infer the underlying reasoning pattern for a textual argument, to reconstruct unstated premises (so-called 'enthymemes'), and to evaluate the quality of the argumentation. We also take a brief look at 'the other side' of mining, i.e., the generation or synthesis of argumentative text. The book finishes with a summary of the argumentation mining tasks, a sketch of potential applications, and a—necessarily subjective—outlook for the field. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Argumentative Language / Modeling Arguments / Corpus Annotation / Finding Claims / Finding Supporting and Objecting Statements / Deriving the Structure of Argumentation / Assessing Argumentation / Generating Argumentative Text / Summary and Perspectives / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index. (shrink)

Among the astonishing variety of sources mentioned in Martin Jay's new book on lying in politics the reader will find ancient Greek philosophical dialogues, pamphlet controversies between eighteenth-century philosophers, post-structural literary theories and, resting easily among the likes of these, a familiar old joke. “How can you tell when a politician is lying?” Jay asks. “He moves his lips” is the answer my grandfather used to give, and that is the punch-line that Jay recounts here. But my grandfather told the (...) joke as part of a syllogism whose unstated premise was “lying is bad” and whose common-sense conclusion was that politics is corrupt. Jay is not satisfied with that conclusion. His book, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics , puts forward a very different argument: He assumes that politics is worthwhile, suggests that it is unavoidably linked to lying, and concludes that lying must not be as bad as we think it is. There are a host of complications and caveats, so many that one could spend a whole review admiring the virtuosity involved in constructing such a rich pastiche of historical episodes and texts touching on mendacity. But the frisson that the book provokes comes almost entirely from its willingness to flirt with the endorsement of vice, so any serious engagement with it cannot avoid responding in some way to that flirtation. (shrink)

The main thesis of this book is that Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is an exemplification of Newtonian physics, whereas the later philosophy exemplifies contemporary, relativistic physics. The reader may recall Wittgenstein’s insistence, during both major periods of his thought, upon the separation of philosophy from science. However, Bolton’s unstated premise is that Wittgenstein’s thought was unconsciously determined by two different conceptions of physics. Whatever one may think of this, it leaves a question unanswered. Since both periods of Wittgenstein’s thought follow (...) the development of relativistic physics, why was he initially influenced by Newtonian physics or its expression in modern philosophy? Was this a contingent error of the youthful Wittgenstein, or an expression of historical inevitability? We find no discussion of this difficult problem in Bolton’s book. Instead, he claims, and to some extent shows, that Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, crystallizes the axioms of modern philosophy, which is essentially Newtonian. At the historical level, this thesis is either wrong or uninformative. It is wrong because not all of modern philosophy can be explained on the basis of the peculiarities of modern or Newtonian physics. It is uninformative because to the extent that all modern philosophers took Newtonian physics for granted, the latter cannot account for the sharp differences between, say, John Locke and Hegel. Nevertheless, Bolton provides interesting and plausible reasons for regarding the Tractatus as an expression of that aspect of modern philosophy which may profitably be called "Newtonian." He fails to convince at least one reader that the repudiation of the Tractatus is a repudiation of modern philosophy for anyone other than Wittgenstein and his followers. On the other hand, once we discount, or even disregard, Bolton’s historical thesis, the more traditional virtues of his book come sharply into focus. Having recently reviewed the 686 page commentary by Baker and Hacker on the first third of the Investigations, as well as Wright’s 481 page essay on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics, the author of this note is in a good position to appreciate the economy and lucidity of Bolton’s summary analysis of the main points in the Tractatus. As an example of my disagreement with Bolton’s interpretation, I begin with a brief citation from p. 86. (shrink)

Identifying the missing or unstated premisses of arguments is important, because their logical quality depends on them. Textbook authors regard enthymematic syllogisms (e.g., "Elvis is a man, so Elvis is mortal") as having an unstated premiss - the major premiss (e.g., "All men are mortal"). They are said to be such because these syllogisms become formally valid when the major premiss is added (i.e., it is a gap-filler). I argue that unstated major premises are not gap-fillers: (...) they support a part of the argument that is already given implicitly - the inference claim ("If the premisses are true then the conclusion is true"). As such, their logical status is the same as that of an unstated proposition that supports the minor premiss, which is not part of the argument. Therefore, the so-called "major premiss" is not an unstated premiss of the enthymeme. (shrink)

A central puzzle of contemporary moral and political philosophy is that while most of us believe that all or almost all human beings enjoy the same moral status, human beings possess the capacities that supposedly ground moral status to very unequal levels. This paper aims to develop a novel strategy to vindicate the idea of moral equality against this challenge. Its central argument is that the puzzle emerges only if one accepts a usually unstated theoretical premise about value and (...) the proper response to value. The premise holds that if the presence of a valuable property warrants a certain kind of response towards its bearers, then every variation in the degree to which the property is present necessarily constitutes a reason for a corresponding variation in the response that is warranted towards its bearers. It argues that despite its intuitive appeal, the premise is not plausible as a general view about the proper way of responding to value, and as a view about responding to the value of rational beings in particular. It proposes an account of the proper manner of valuing rational beings that supports a distinctive version of the so-called threshold approach to justifying equal moral status. (shrink)

In their book EVALUATING CRITICAL THINKING Stephen Norris and Robert Ennis say: “Although it is tempting to think that certain [unstated] assumptions are logically necessary for an argument or position, they are not. So do not ask for them.” Numerous writers of introductory logic texts as well as various highly visible standardized tests (e.g., the LSAT and GRE) presume that the Norris/Ennis view is wrong; the presumption is that many arguments have (unstated) necessary assumptions and that readers and (...) test takers can reasonably be expected to identify such assumptions. This paper proposes and defends criteria for determining necessary assumptions of arguments. Both theoretical and empirical considerations are brought to bear. (shrink)

Transmission arguments against closure of knowledge base the case against closure on the premise that a necessary condition for knowledge is not closed. Warfield argues that this kind of argument is fallacious whereas Brueckner, Murphy and Yan try to rescue it. According to them, the transmission argument is no longer fallacious once an implicit assumption is made explicit. I defend Warfield’s objection by arguing that the various proposals for the unstated assumption either do not avoid the fallacy or turn (...) the central premise of the transmission argument, namely that a necessary condition is not closed, into a redundant and superfluous premise. I conclude that Warfield’s advice is still to be heeded: Arguments against closure must not rely essentially on the premise that a necessary condition for knowledge is not closed. (shrink)

In this article the questions under discussion are the properties of Descartes’s application of the first rule of his method, which requires not to agree with anything that could give rise to doubt. It is well known that Descartes came to the conclusion that only the truth “I think, therefore I am” is undoubted. The article examines the logical status of this truth and reveals that it is an entimeme where the major premise is unstated. An analysis of Descartes’s (...) works shows that the premise that he does not explicitly express is the proposition “If I think, therefore I exist, and if I do not think, then I do not exist.” It follows that Descartes’ complete syllogism would be like this: “I exist if and only if I think; I think; therefore, I exist.” In this paper, the discussion focuses on the proof of the certainty of the position “I exist,” proposed by St Augustin in his treatise The City of God. St Augustin proves the proposition “I am deceived that I exist” to be false in every possible interpretation. Hence the position “I exist” is true in every possible interpretation. According to Descartes, the only undoubted statements are those that are kept within the limits of “I think,” or within the limits of inner experience, while the data of external experience are always dubious. Thus, the statement “I walk” is not obvious, since it can only seem to me that I am walking. At the same time, the judgment “It seems to me that I walk” is undoubtedly. Ancient sceptics also believed that the data of internal experience are doubtless, and the data of external experience are not due to the fact that all objects of the external world are in fact not what they seem to be. However, there is a significant difference between the ancient sceptical approach and that of Descartes. I put forward the view that the ancient sceptics, although they are convinced that the things of the external world are not what they seem, still surely believe that each item in that world exists. But Descartes surpassed both ancient sceptics and academics in their scepticism, since he doubted the very existence of the external world. He was able to imagine that he exists exclusively as a thinking entity with no body, no world around him, and no space to store that world. It is by the fact that Descartes doubts the existence of the external world that he has cleared the way for transcendental philosophy and phenomenology. (shrink)

For several millennia now, the enthymeme has been taught, on the putative authority of Aristotle, as "a kind of syllogism" —that is, a rhetorical syllogism—that consists in a three-part unit of deductive reasoning that parallels the inductive reasoning of the example. The rhetorical syllogism is said to be imperfect or incomplete because it relies on probable or particular rather than certain or universal premises and because the speaker suppresses one premise or the conclusion, usually the major premise, leaving it (...) with only two stated terms as follows:Socrates is a manSocrates is mortalOne premise is left unstated because it is known to the members of the audience (they... (shrink)

In the First Section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant argues that a good-willed person “under subjective limitations and hindrances” (G 397) is required “never to act except in such a way that [she] could also will that [her] maxim should become a universal law” (G 402).2 This requirement has come to be known as the Formula of Universal Law (FUL) version of the Categorical Imperative, an “ought” statement expressing a command of reason that “represent[s] an action (...) as objectively necessary of itself, without reference to another end” (G 414). The question of how to understand and apply the FUL has received a great deal of attention in recent years. But Kant’s reasoning for the claim that a good-willed person (of a certain kind) acts in accordance with the FUL has not been investigated with the same degree of thoroughness. My purpose in this paper is to render the structure of Kant’s argument perspicuous, and thereby contribute to its proper evaluation by identifying its true strengths and weaknesses.3 Let us call Kant’s argument “K” and its conclusion “C”. The task at hand requires identification of K’s premises and of the reasoning by means of which C is derived. One of the advantages of clarifying K’s structure in this way is that doing so permits us to answer questions that continue to puzzle even the most sympathetic readers of the First Section. Some of these questions concern three “Propositions” to which Kant 1 draws our attention in the course of his presentation. The First Proposition (call it “P1”) is left unstated, but most commentators agree that it (or at least part of it) should be rendered as follows: (P1) A human action has moral worth only if it is done from duty.4 Kant states the other two propositions (call the Second “P2” and Third “P3”) explicitly: (P2) An action from duty has its moral worth not in the purpose to be attained by it but in the maxim in accordance with which it is decided upon. (G 399). (shrink)

There is a recurrent sort of skeptical character in philosophical debates who believes that some social practice must be abolished because it involves a false presupposition about how things ‘really’ are. I examine this style of skeptical argument, using the moral responsibility skeptic as my main illustration. I excavate two unstated and un-argued for premises that it requires (which I call Undistorted Truth and Privileged Conception). This exposes the full extent of the argumentative burdens that such a skeptic (...) must discharge. I aim to make progress by offering skeptics and anti-skeptics alike a way forward: the skeptic is provided a clear agenda, while the anti-skeptic is provided a diagnostic tool to assess this style of skeptical arguments at key junctures. (shrink)

Often an argument will rely on the hearer’s knowing something obvious or implied. Such knowledge is said to be contained in an unstated or missing premise.

According to Timothy Williamson 's epistemic view, vague predicates have precise extensions, we just don't know where their boundaries lie. It is a central challenge to his view to explain why we would be so ignorant, if precise borderlines were really there. He offers a novel argument to show that our insuperable ignorance ``is just what independently justified epistemic principles would lead one to expect''. This paper carefully formulates and critically examines Williamson 's argument. It is shown that the argument (...) does not explain our ignorance, and is not really apt for doing so. Williamson 's unjustified commitment to a controversial and crucial assumption is noted. It is also argued in three different ways that his argument is, in any case, self-defeating – the same principles that drive the argument can be applied to undermine one of its premises. Along the way, Williamson 's unstated commitment to a number of other controversial doctrines comes to light. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Svātantrika-Prāsaṅgika Distinction: What Difference Does a Difference Make?William EdelglassThe Svātantrika-Prāsaṅgika Distinction: What Difference Does a Difference Make? Edited by Georges B. J. Dreyfus and Sara L. McClintock. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003. Pp. viii + 398.As early as Bhāvaviveka (sixth century), Indian Buddhist doxographers situated important philosophers in schools and sub-schools characterized by adherence to distinct views, thereby providing a coherent, hierarchical presentation of the Buddha's teaching. In (...) Tibet this practice continued and gained considerable importance: the pedagogical and hermeneutical significance of ordering texts occasioned widespread doxographical literary production.1 The doxographical projects, in which the systematic understanding of unchanging 'tenets' was privileged over the singular views of individual authors, were highly contested. Much of the disagreement was due to the multiplicity of interpretations bound to arise during a millennium of intellectual exchange. Doxographical hierarchy set the parameters of intellectual discourse, and thus the classification of tenets was not simply a matter of historical interest. Traditions were constructed in such a way that one's own thought would conform to an acceptable view, to say nothing of the complex relationship between political power and religious doctrine in Tibet. Despite the contested status of Tibetan doxographical categories, the classifications and distinctions that order much contemporary Western scholarship on Mahāyāna Buddhism in India were inherited from Tibet. Until recently, even the best research often uncritically employed dominant Tibetan classifications as basic interpretive categories and was thus able to bring order to an enormous body of literature.The most philosophically significant and vigorously contested classification in Tibetan doxography is the distinction between the Rang rgyud pa and the Thal 'gyur ba (sanskritized by modern scholars as 'Svātantrika' and 'Prāsaṅgika', respectively). The original locus of the discussion is three Indian commentaries on Nāgārjuna's (second century) Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Buddhapālita (fifth-sixth centuries), in what is the oldest extant commentary on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā by a known author, followed Nāgārjuna's reductio ad absurdam form of argumentation, leading from the opponent's premise to an untenable consequence (prasaṅga, thal 'gyur). Shortly thereafter Bhāvaviveka claimed that for every prasan.ga argument in Nāgārjuna's text there is an unstated positive argument, and he criticized Buddhapālita for not utilizing the new methods of Buddhist logic to demonstrate the validity of Madhyamaka thought. Bhāvaviveka argued that Mādhyamikas ought to present formal probative (prayoga; sbyor ba) and autonomous (svatantraprayoga; rang rgyud kyi sbyor ba) arguments and argued that inferential reasoning was necessary to establish the Madhyamaka view of emptiness. Candrakīrti (seventh century) then defended Buddhapālita, insisting that prasaṅga arguments were the only fitting method for a Mādhyamika because they do not require the affirmation of inherent nature. Roughly five centuries later, although Madhyamaka had already been divided according to a variety of classifications in India and Tibet, some Tibetan scholars retroactively characterized Bhāvaviveka as the founder of the Svātantrikas and Candrakīrti as the [End Page 415] founder of the Prāsaṅgikas. Tsong kha pa (1357-1419), the most famous proponent of the Svātantrika-Prāsaṅgika distinction, believed this debate was about more than methodological or epistemological questions: because autonomous argumentation requires inherently existing objects, even if only conventionally, he claimed that Svātantrikas were crypto-realists who deviated from Nāgārjuna's radical understanding of emptiness.Tsong kha pa's analysis of the Svātantrika-Prāsaṅgika distinction, and therefore Madhyamaka philosophy in general, came to dominate Western scholarly research. However, in the last few decades there has been considerable exploration of the forces and influences that contributed to the emergence of conflicting Tibetan doxographical systems.2 This research program has been significantly furthered with the publication of The Svātantrika-Prāsaṅgika Distinction: What Difference Does a Difference Make? Because the Svātantrika-Prāsaṅgika distinction is a Tibetan conceptual construction based on Indian commentaries, an understanding of the issues involved requires a careful analysis of the Indian sources, an investigation of the growth of the various doxographies in Tibet... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Philosophical EssaysCarol PosterAristotle’s Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays, edited by David J. Furley and Alexander Nehamas; xv & 322 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $45.00.Scholars will find Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Philosophical Essays fascinating both for what is present and what is absent. As Alexander Nehamas states (pp. xi–xiv), this volume attempts to rectify the neglect by philosophers of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in particular and rhetoric in general. While the (...) volume’s introduction and eleven essays are erudite, readable, and well-argued within their own logical and philosophical disciplinary traditions, the absence of reference both to contemporary rhetorical scholarship and ancient rhetorical traditions is somewhat disappointing.M. F. Burnyeat’s essay typifies both the strengths and weaknesses of the collection. Burnyeat presents a reception history of the Aristotelean enthymeme [End Page 361] in the logical tradition, and argues convincingly for reading the enthymeme as a relaxed rather than truncated syllogism. Missing, however, is a sense of how the enthymeme changed in response to large scale movements in ancient rhetorical theory and reference to contemporary rhetorical scholarship on the enthymeme, which covers much territory Burnyeat treats as unexplored.Several contributors compare the Rhetoric with Aristotle’s other works. Jacques Brunschwig claims that the Rhetoric and the Topics contextualize rhetoric differently and address different audiences. Glenn Most argues quite persuasively that Aristotle constructs a hierarchy of argumentative precision, with logic using the most precise, ethics and politics somewhat less precise, and rhetoric the least precise arguments. He shows that Aristotle’s treatment of endoxa (opinions) in the Rhetoric, Nichomachean Ethics, and Politics reflects this hierarchy. John Cooper points out that rhetoric looks to ethics/politics for its subject matter, but his argument applies only to one of the three genres of oratory and overlooks the heuristic potential of the topoi. Both Most and Cooper, though providing solid philosophical analyses of endoxa, do not discuss the rhetorical use of endoxa as gnômai, and thus useful premises for enthymemes. Stephen Halliwell also reconciles the Rhetoric with Aristotle’s ethical works by showing how the advantageous tends to, rather than opposes, the good.Alexander Nehamas builds a coherent theory of the emotions as amenable to reason by investigating fear and pity in the Rhetoric and Poetics. André Laks, drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, discusses two traditions of metaphor, ornamental and transformative, in the Poetics and Rhetoric. Jean-Louis Labarrière contributes a solid and highly original comparison of painting and oratory in Plato and Aristotle.Jürgen Sprute sees rhetoric not only as a solution to a Platonic impasse, but as a necessary and effective tool for Aristotelian political philosophy. Mary McCabe argues that Aristotle refutes both Phaedrus and Gorgias by showing that rhetoric is a technê and consequently a legitimate political tool. Eckart Schütrumpf presents the compelling and original suggestion that Aristotle’s Rhetoric should be read as extending the framework of the late Platonic Laws rather than as refuting earlier Platonic dialogues.Many of these essays share two serious flaws. The first is an unstated tendency to read the Aristotelian corpus as unproblematically systematic and polished, and all apparent contradictions as susceptible to reconciliation. More explicit attention to interpretative assumptions, as is commonplace in Platonic scholarship but rare in Aristotelian, might be desirable. The second flaw is disciplinary insularity. As Nehamas points out (pp. xi-xiv), rhetoric and philosophy were not clearly demarcated in antiquity. To respond to Aristotle’s Rhetoric adequately, scholars need to transcend contemporary disciplinary divisions, and attempt to synthesize rhetorical, logical, philosophical, and literary scholarship, something this volume, despite its many strengths, fails to do.Carol PosterUniversity of Northern IowaCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The categorical syllogism is the foundation of Aristotelian logic, and Aristotle's logic is the foundation of modern logic. Proper fallacies were rather errors in reasoning based on ambiguities, such as those Aristotle speaks of in Sophistical Refutations and on which Galen comments in De Captionibus (On Fallacies). Each categorical fallacy is a violation of a rule for the formation of valid syllogisms. Formal fallacies, according to Aldrich, include any reasoning that violates the law of identity, law of non‐contradiction, or law (...) of excluded middle. This chapter deals with one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, the exclusive premises (EP). EP occurs when a syllogism has two negative premises, which are propositions that deny a connection between the subject and predicate. The quality or quantity of the premises of a syllogism can make them exclusive to one another. (shrink)

In this paper I shall attempt to analyze some comparative aspects of modern societies which bear on the problem of convergence of modern, especially industrial, societies and the closely related analytical problems of the relations between culture and social structure.

The rise of causality and the attendant graph-theoretic modeling tools in the study of counterfactual reasoning has had resounding effects in many areas of cognitive science, but it has thus far not permeated the mainstream in linguistic theory to a comparable degree. In this study I show that a version of the predominant framework for the formal semantic analysis of conditionals, Kratzer-style premise semantics, allows for a straightforward implementation of the crucial ideas and insights of Pearl-style causal networks. I spell (...) out the details of such an implementation, focusing especially on the notions of intervention on a network and backtracking interpretations of counterfactuals. (shrink)

중세 스콜라 학자들은 ‘신의 존재’에 대해 많은 증명과 그 증명에 대한 비판을 남겨 놓았다. 그렇지만 이런 증명들에 대한 논의가자연과학이 발달한 현대에도 과연 의미를 지닐 수 있을까? 본 연구에서는 가장 유명한 두 증명을 비교해 보았다.????신학대전????에 나오는 ‘다섯가지 길’을 통해 ‘경험론적 증명’의 대표자 토마스 아퀴나스는 가장 유명한 신존재 증명 중에 하나인 안셀무스의????프로슬로기온????에 기원을 둔 존재론적 증명을 비판했다. 본 논문에서는 이를 소개한 후, 토마스의 안셀무스 비판이 과연 정당한가를 살펴보았다. 이를 토대로 두 사상가들이 지녔던 상이한 전제들과 의도들이 무엇인가를 기술했다. 그런데 안셀무스의 증명은 그가 전제했던 (...) 플라톤적인 체계와 실재 관념을 받아들이지 않는 경험론자들에게는 아무런 설득력도 지니지 못할 것이다. 토마스 아퀴나스의 “다섯 가지 길”도 그곳에 포함되어 있는 아리스토텔레스적인 전제가의문시되는 곳에서는 그 설득력을 잃어버린다. 이처럼 신존재 증명에 대한 평가는 모두 평가자 자신의 형이상학적 입장에 따라 다르게 판단된다. 우리는 각자 자신이 가지고 있는 형이상학적이거나 신앙적인 전제에 따라 어떠한 종류의 신존재증명을 인정하거나일부 또는 일체의 신존재증명을 부정할 수도 있다. 그러나 다양한신존재증명은 다른 입장의 문제점을 드러나게 해 주고, 인간이 직접 전체적으로 포괄할 수 없는 신적인 실재에 대한 이해가능성을한 측면에서라도 높여 줄 수 있다. 신존재증명들간의 차이에 대한성찰은 우리 현대인의 사고틀도 경직되어 있지 않은가를 돌아보게해 준다. 개별적인 신존재 증명은 이를 접하는 각자가 지니고 있는전제에 기반해서 실존적인 결단을 도와줄 이성적인 성찰로서의 기능할 수 있을 것이다. (shrink)

When, if ever, is one justified in accepting the premises of an argument? What is the proper criterion of premise acceptability? Can the criterion be theoretically or philosophically justified? This is the first book to provide a comprehensive theory of premise acceptability and it answers the questions above from an epistemological approach that the author calls common sense foundationalism. It will be eagerly sought out not just by specialists in informal logic, critical thinking, and argumentation theory but also by (...) a broader range of philosophers and those teaching rhetoric. (shrink)

It is tempting to think that multi premise closure creates a special class of paradoxes having to do with the accumulation of risks, and that these paradoxes could be escaped by rejecting the principle, while still retaining single premise closure. I argue that single premise deduction is also susceptible to risks. I show that what I take to be the strongest argument for rejecting multi premise closure is also an argument for rejecting single premise closure. Because of the symmetry between (...) the principles, they come as a package: either both will have to be rejected or both will have to be revised. (shrink)

Condorcet's famous jury theorem reaches an optimistic conclusion on the correctness of majority decisions, based on two controversial premises about voters: they are competent and vote independently, in a technical sense. I carefully analyse these premises and show that: whether a premise is justi…ed depends on the notion of probability considered; none of the notions renders both premises simultaneously justi…ed. Under the perhaps most interesting notions, the independence assumption should be weakened.

This note is a reply to ‘On the Lumping Semantics of Counterfactuals’ by Makoto Kanazawa, Stefan Kaufmann and Stanley Peters. It shows first that the first triviality result obtained by Kanazawa, Kaufmann, and Peters is already ruled out by the constraints on admissible premise sets listed in Kratzer (1989). Second, and more importantly, it points out that the results obtained by Kanazawa, Kaufmann, and Peters are obsolete in view of the revised analysis of counterfactuals in Kratzer (1990, 2002).

In the face of land confiscations and other forms of imperialism characteristic of the 19th century in Aotearoa/new Zealand, the second Maori King Tawhiao devised a number of sayings that seem at first glance to be entirely mythical. Highly metaphorical and poetic, they appear to refer, as Bakhtin would have it in his discussion of the epic, to a language that is emotional, innately tied to a static mooring of pre-rational thought. Yet, in this paper we argue that a Maori (...) metaphysics complicates the delineations between primordial and novelistic language. Indeed, there is in a Maori worldview the notion that a term contains to it both postcolonial and mythical traces at once. Thus each apparently primordial term is tinged with the realities of colonised experience, even if they seem concrete and self-referential. In this paper we address those multiple voices in light of Bakhtin’s philosophies on heteroglossia, and argue that the accusation of ‘myth’ in relation to Tawhiao’s sayings is possible yet does not accommodate the metaphysics founding the sayings. We speculate that there is a form of freedom in Tawhiao’s words that exists regardless of our interpretation but that calls to be unearthed through an open reading. Sir Robert Mahuta, prominent Tainui leader, is one who has already indicated the need for a heteroglossic reading of Tawhiao. We then move to a description of the Waikato-Tainui College for Research and Development as it attempts to carry out this heteroglossic reading of Maori political and metaphysical text and utterance. (shrink)

Oaksford & Chater (O&C) begin in the halfway Bayesian house of assuming that minor premises in conditional inferences are certain. We demonstrate that this assumption is a serious limitation. They additionally suggest that appealing to Jeffrey's rule could make their approach more general. We present evidence that this rule is not limited enough to account for actual probability judgements.

Indian logic is mainly devoted to the study of nyaya the logical structure of which is analogous to that of a categorical syllogism. In a nyaya it is inferred that since the probans (similar to the middle term) is pervaded by or never exists without the probandum (similar to the major term) and since the probans belongs to the inferential subject (similar to the minor term), the probandum belongs to the inferential subject. Many modern scholars hold that in early Indian (...) logic a nyaya was an analogical argument from particular to particular. We disagree. Early Nyaya works say explicitly that what deviates is a pseudo-probans; this implies that a probans is non-deviant or pervaded by the probandum and thus that a universal premise stating the pervasion of the probans by the probandum is needed. Such a universal premise is also found in articulated arguments. Further, a counterargument based on mere analogy to a nyaya based on a universal connection is viewed as a pseudo-refutation. (shrink)

Many philosophers have been attracted to the view that reasons are premises of good reasoning – that reasons to φ are premises of good reasoning towards φ-ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this article, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing out implications (...) for the debate over pragmatic reasons for belief and other attitudes and for one influential form of reductionism about the normative. (shrink)

In the paper, certain rational postulates for protocols describing real communicating are introduced.These rational postulates, on the one hand, allow assigning a certain typology of real systems of interactions, which is consistent with the reality of epistemic argumentation in systems of communicating, and on the other one – defining rules of using argumentation in real situations. Moreover, the presented postulates for protocols characterize information networks and administering knowledge in real interactivity systems. Due to the epistemic character of the considerations, the (...) problem undertaken in the paper concerns working out fundamental assumptions that refer to building of epistemic logics. They allow establishing the correctness of the discourse defined by rational postulates of protocols of real communication. In the context of the presented problem there are the following two research questions distinguished: 1) How do we determine the rule of building of real dynamic epistemic logics? and 2) How should we define semantics for these logics? Within the framework of considerations relating to the research questions asked, certain epistemic operators, relativized to types of communicating, are introduced. Basic logical relations between using these operators are established for these operators. The relations are presented by a diagram called the square of epis temic operators. On the basis of these logical relations some axioms for real dynamic epistemic logics are presented. The semantics of real dynamic epistem ic logics is extended by the methods of lower and upper approximation of formula evaluating. This allows defining ‘approximation Kripke models’. The results of conceptualization of knowledge on real premises of epistemic argum entation presented in this paper can be applied to rhetoric in real systems of interaction. (shrink)

Indian logic is mainly devoted to the study of nyaya the logical structure of which is analogous to that of a categorical syllogism. In a nyaya it is inferred that since the probans (similar to the middle term) is pervaded by or never exists without the probandum (similar to the major term) and since the probans belongs to the inferential subject (similar to the minor term), the probandum belongs to the inferential subject. Many modern scholars hold that in early Indian (...) logic a nyaya was an analogical argument from particular to particular. We disagree. Early Nyaya works say explicitly that what deviates is a pseudo-probans; this implies that a probans is non-deviant or pervaded by the probandum and thus that a universal premise stating the pervasion of the probans by the probandum is needed. Such a universal premise is also found in articulated arguments. Further, a counterargument based on mere analogy to a nyaya based on a universal connection is viewed as a pseudo-refutation. (shrink)

Indian logic is mainly devoted to the study of nyaya the logical structure of which is analogous to that of a categorical syllogism. In a nyaya it is inferred that since the probans (similar to the middle term) is pervaded by or never exists without the probandum (similar to the major term) and since the probans belongs to the inferential subject (similar to the minor term), the probandum belongs to the inferential subject. Many modern scholars hold that in early Indian (...) logic a nyaya was an analogical argument from particular to particular. We disagree. Early Nyaya works say explicitly that what deviates is a pseudo-probans; this implies that a probans is non-deviant or pervaded by the probandum and thus that a universal premise stating the pervasion of the probans by the probandum is needed. Such a universal premise is also found in articulated arguments. Further, a counterargument based on mere analogy to a nyaya based on a universal connection is viewed as a pseudo-refutation. (shrink)

In ‘Against vaccine nationalism’, Nicole Hassoun misrepresents our argument, distorts our position and ignores crucial distinctions we present in our article, ‘Love thy neighbor? Allocating vaccines in a world of competing obligations’. She has created a strawman that does not resemble our position. In this reply, we address two features of ‘Against vaccine nationalism’. First, we address a phantom premise. Hassoun misattributes to us a thesis, according to which citizen-directed duties are stronger than noncitizen-directed duties. This thesis is a figment (...) of her imagination, not a fragment of our argument. Second, we address a shape-shifting ism. Ambiguity attaches to ‘vaccine nationalism,’ ambiguity that Hassoun exploits despite our distinguishing various meanings of the phrase. As a result, the type of vaccine nationalism she argues against is not the type we defend. (shrink)

This essay formulates some premises of interdisciplinarity. The ideas are critically and generally expressed but the references content, presented in the paper, are thematically precise (they are generally of speciality). These references also support the dowbts re- garding this issue, that are critically expressed in the pa- per. The interdisciplinarity is a real fact (a reality) but even a neutral and optimistic analysis of it should start in a critic spirit. The interdisciplinarity is not a miraculous solution to all (...) the difficulties we encounter while trying to understand the complex world we inhabit. It is men- tioned that the main considerations of this paper are ex- pressed in an epistemology view. (shrink)

It’s often thought that the phenomenon of risk aggregation poses a problem for multi-premise closure but not for single-premise closure. But recently, Lasonen-Aarnio and Schechter have challenged this thought. Lasonen-Aarnio argues that, insofar as risk aggregation poses a problem for multi-premise closure, it poses a similar problem for single-premise closure. For she thinks that, there being such a thing as deductive risk, risk may aggregate over a single premise and the deduction itself. Schechter argues that single-premise closure succumbs to risk (...) aggregation outright. For he thinks that there could be a long sequence of competent single-premise deductions such that, even though we are justified in believing the initial premise of the sequence, intutively, we are not justified in believing the final conclusion. This intuition, Schechter thinks, vitiates single-premise closure. In this paper, I defend single-premise closure against the arguments offered by Lasonen-Aarnio and Schechter. (shrink)

Contemporary research in the field of Foucauldian studies on education have pointed to a growing imbrication between educational practises and neoliberal ideas. The problematization of such scenario would lead to two premises, grounded on a general hypothesis for the analysis of the educational present. The first premise: nowadays, the educational or, to be more precise, educationalizing practises—since they would not deal only with the schooling effort, but also with the diffusion of a great number of pedagogical initiatives of non-formal (...) character—consists in an efficient rationality of governing of oneself and others. The second premise is that such educationalizing movement consists not only in the expression but also in the typical modus operandi of the current governmentalization processes, which aim at a large-scale administration of the multiplicity of populations now in terms of a lifelong educatibility for the citizens. These two premises sustain the hypothesis that the present educational practises do not restrict themselves to the mere condition of reiterative apparatus of imperatives extrinsic to them, but have in fact cemented themselves as a generative locus of the veridiction/subjectivization games capable of overrunning the whole social space. (shrink)

Indian logic is mainly devoted to the study of nyaya the logical structure of which is analogous to that of a categorical syllogism. In a nyaya it is inferred that since the probans (similar to the middle term) is pervaded by or never exists without the probandum (similar to the major term) and since the probans belongs to the inferential subject (similar to the minor term), the probandum belongs to the inferential subject. Many modern scholars hold that in early Indian (...) logic a nyaya was an analogical argument from particular to particular. We disagree. Early Nyaya works say explicitly that what deviates is a pseudo-probans; this implies that a probans is non-deviant or pervaded by the probandum and thus that a universal premise stating the pervasion of the probans by the probandum is needed. Such a universal premise is also found in articulated arguments. Further, a counterargument based on mere analogy to a nyaya based on a universal connection is viewed as a pseudo-refutation. (shrink)

Indian logic is mainly devoted to the study of nyaya the logical structure of which is analogous to that of a categorical syllogism. In a nyaya it is inferred that since the probans (similar to the middle term) is pervaded by or never exists without the probandum (similar to the major term) and since the probans belongs to the inferential subject (similar to the minor term), the probandum belongs to the inferential subject. Many modern scholars hold that in early Indian (...) logic a nyaya was an analogical argument from particular to particular. We disagree. Early Nyaya works say explicitly that what deviates is a pseudo-probans; this implies that a probans is non-deviant or pervaded by the probandum and thus that a universal premise stating the pervasion of the probans by the probandum is needed. Such a universal premise is also found in articulated arguments. Further, a counterargument based on mere analogy to a nyaya based on a universal connection is viewed as a pseudo-refutation. (shrink)

Indian logic is mainly devoted to the study of nyaya the logical structure of which is analogous to that of a categorical syllogism. In a nyaya it is inferred that since the probans (similar to the middle term) is pervaded by or never exists without the probandum (similar to the major term) and since the probans belongs to the inferential subject (similar to the minor term), the probandum belongs to the inferential subject. Many modern scholars hold that in early Indian (...) logic a nyaya was an analogical argument from particular to particular. We disagree. Early Nyaya works say explicitly that what deviates is a pseudo-probans; this implies that a probans is non-deviant or pervaded by the probandum and thus that a universal premise stating the pervasion of the probans by the probandum is needed. Such a universal premise is also found in articulated arguments. Further, a counterargument based on mere analogy to a nyaya based on a universal connection is viewed as a pseudo-refutation. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate some families of decision problems associated with a restricted class of Post canonical forms, specifically, those defined over one-letter alphabets whose productions have single premises and contain only one variable. For brevity sake, we call any such form an RPCF (Restricted Post Canonical Form). Constructive proofs are given which show, for any prescribed nonrecursive r.e. many-one degree of unsolvability D, the existence of an RPCF whose word problem is of degree D and an RPCF (...) with axiom whose decision problem is also of degree D. Finally, we show that both of these results are best possible in that they do not hold for one-one degrees. (shrink)

In this article we discuss the modern premises of visuality and the effects of the cultural transfer of optical and photographic techniques on the work of Max Blecher, a Romanian Jewish writer who was a keen explorer of Marcel Proust’s works. In his works Blecher pursued the same theme as Proust—the mechanisms of interior memory and life—and often used optical instruments as a metaphor of identity. The role of the photographic model in his depiction of social tableaux, characters, and (...) dispositions, originated partly in the influence of Proust’s writing and partly in other techniques of the European literary avant-gardes. (shrink)

It is quite clear to me that there is nothing presently available to rival this book." —Wlad Godzich, University of Geneva "Hamacher's Premises is the heir and successor to the most important theoretical and critical work done in American ...

"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general. In _Premises_ Hamacher demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable—and thus operates as a structural imperative—but is also unattainable and therefore by necessity open to possibilities other than that defined as "position," to redefinitions and unexpected transformations of (...) the merely thetical act. Proceeding along the lines of both philosophical argument and critical reading, Hamacher presents the fullest account of the vast disruption in the theories and ethics of positional and propositional acts—a disruption first exposed by Kant's analysis of the minimal requirements for linguistic and practical action. Focusing on the double trait of every premise—that it is promised but never attained—Hamacher analyzes nine decisive themes, topics, and texts of modernity: the hermeneutic circle in Schleiermacher and Heidegger, the structure of ethical commands in Kant, Nietzsche's genealogy of moral terms and his exploration of the aporias of singularity, the irony of reading in de Man, the parabasis of positing acts in Fichte and Schlegel, Kleist's disruption of narrative representation, the gesture of naming in Benjamin and Kafka, and the incisive caesura that Paul Celan inserts into temporal and linguistic reversals. There is no book that so fully brings the issues of both critical philosophy and critical literature into reach. _Reviews_ "Werner Hamacher's _Premises_ is the heir and successor to the most important theoretical and critical work done in American departments of comparative literature from the 1960s through the 1980s. Yet, _Premises_ is no more a work of literary scholarship than one of philosophical submission to philosophy. With the gesture that is genuinely called post-structural, which is the suspicion and suspension of every code, the book's act of freedom is freedom to read and write language _tout court_." —Timothy Bahti, University of Michigan "Hamacher's project can be described as the retracing of the epistemological ground upon which the modern conception of the literary was erected. It is quite clear to me that there is nothing presently available to rival this book." —Wlad Godzich, University of Geneva. (shrink)