This paper summarizes various interpretations of emotional arguments, with a focus on the emotional mode of argument introduced in the multi-modal argumentation model (Gilbert, 1994). From there the author shifts from a descriptive account of emotional arguments to a discussion about a normative framework. Pointing out problems with evaluative models of the emotional mode, a paradigmatic shift captured by the Amenable Argumentation Approach is explained as a way forward for the advancement of the emotional mode and (...) multi-modal argumentation. (shrink)

Recently, null arguments have been treated as an ellipsis phenomenon, derived by PF-deletion or LF-copy under some kind of identity requirements. Focusing on Japanese null arguments, this paper argues that they are base-generated empty nominals which are interpreted via choice functions. The functional approach is supported by cases involving intermediate scope readings, missing antecedents, and implicational bridging. A less standard case of Japanese null arguments anteceded by QPs is also discussed and shown to be amenable to the choice (...) functional analysis supplemented by a general requirement of structural parallelism. (shrink)

The concept of moral distress comes from nursing ethics, and was initially defined as ‘…when one knows the right thing to do, but institutional constraints make it nearly impossible to pursue the right course of action’. There is a large body of literature associated with moral distress, yet multiple definitions now exist, significantly limiting its usefulness. We undertook a systematic review of the argument-based bioethics literature on this topic as the basis for a critical appraisal, identifying 55 papers for analysis. (...) We found that moral distress is most frequently framed around individual experiences of distress in relation to local practices and constraints, and understood in terms of power relations and workplace hierarchies. This understanding is directly derived from, and often still seen as specific to, nursing. Frequently the perspective of the morally distressed individual is privileged. Understandings of moral distress have evolved towards an ‘occupational health approach’, with the assumption that moral distress should be measured and prevented. Counter-perspectives were identified, highlighting conceptual problems. Based on our review, we propose a redefinition of moral distress: ‘Ethical unease or disquiet resulting from a situation where a clinician believes they have contributed to avoidable patient or community harm through their involvement in an action, inaction or decision that conflicts with their own values’. This definition is specific enough for research use, anchored in clinicians’ professional responsibilities and concerns about harms to patients, framed relationally rather than hierarchically, and amenable to multiple perspectives on any given morally distressing situation. (shrink)

Infinite regress arguments are a powerful tool in Aristotle, but this style of argument has received relatively little attention. Improving our understanding of infinite regress arguments has become pressing since recent scholars have pointed out that it is not clear whether Aristotle’s infinite regress arguments are, in general, effective or indeed what the logical structure of these arguments is. One obvious approach would be to hold that Aristotle takes infinite regress arguments to be per impossibile arguments, which derive an (...) infinite sequence. Due to his finitism, Aristotle then rejects such a sequence as impossible. This paper argues that this obvious approach does not work, even for its most amenable cases. The paper argues instead that infinite regress arguments involve domain-specific infinities, and so there is not a general finitism which underpins infinite regress arguments in Aristotle, but rather domain-specific reasons that there cannot be an infinite number of entities in each domain in which Aristotle invokes an infinite regress argument. (shrink)

By definition, the implicit commitment of a formal theory $$\textrm{Th}$$ Th consists of sentences that are independent of the axioms of $$\textrm{Th}$$ Th, but their acceptance is implicit in the acceptance of $$\textrm{Th}$$ Th. In Cieśliński (2017, 2018), the phenomenon of implicit commitments was studied from the epistemological perspective through the lenses of the formal theory of believability. The current paper provides a comprehensive proof-theoretic analysis of this approach and compares it to other main theories of implicit commitments. We (...) argue that the formal results presented in the paper favour the believability theory over its main competitors. However, there is still a fly in the ointment. We argue that in its current formulation, the theory cannot deliver all the goods for which it was defined. In particular, being amenable to a generalised conservativeness argument, it does not support the view that the notion of truth is epistemically light. At the end of the paper, we discuss possible ways out of the problem. (shrink)

Our meta-argumentative vocabulary supplies the conceptual tools used to reflectively analyse, regulate, and evaluate our argumentative performances. Yet, this vocabulary is susceptible to misunderstanding and abuse in ways that make possible new discursive mistakes and pathologies. Thus, our efforts to self-regulate our reason-transacting practices by articulating their norms makes possible new ways to violate and flout those very norms. Scott Aikin identifies the structural possibility of this vicious feedback loop as the Owl of Minerva Problem. In the spirit of a (...) shared concern for the flourishing or our rational, argumentative practices, this paper approaches the Owl of Minerva Problem from a vantage point that, by comparison with Aikin’s, affords perspectives that are more pessimistic in some aspects and more optimistic in others. Pessimistically, the problem at the root of the weaponization of our meta-argumentative vocabulary is motivational, not structural. Its motivational nature explains its resistance to the normal repertoire of reparative argumentative maneuvers, as well as revealing a profound and deeply entrenched misunderstanding of the connection between our reasons-transacting practices and the goods achievable within them. Optimistically, in the absence of this motivational problem, the misunderstandings and errors made possible by our meta-argumentative vocabularies are amenable to remedy by familiar techniques of discursive instruction and repair. More optimistically, even though our meta-argumentative vocabularies are generated only retrospectively, they can be used prospectively, thereby making possible an aspirational motivation resulting in a virtuous cycle of increasingly autonomous normative self-regulation. Properly harnessed, the Owl of Minerva releases the Lark of Arete. (shrink)

I present considerations surrounding pre-reflective self-consciousness, arising in work I am conducting on a new physicalist, process-based account of [phenomenal] consciousness. The account is called the meta-causal account because it identifies consciousness with a certain type of arrangement of meta-causation. Meta-causation is causation where a cause or effect is itself an instance of causation. The proposed type of arrangement involves a sort of time-spanning, internal reflexivity of the overall meta-causation. I argue that, as a result of the account, any conscious (...) process has PRSC. Hence, PRSC does not need to be taken as a stipulation or argued for on purely phenomenological grounds or as a necessary support for reflective consciousness. I also show how it is natural to the account that PRSC is not an additional, peripheral, sort of consciousness, but is intrinsic to all consciousness, thereby fitting claims about self-intimation and co-constitution by various authors, and also being amenable to an adverbial account. As part of this, consciousness of an external object is just the form that current self-consciousness takes, the meta-causal constitution of it being inextricably modulated by the causal relationship with the object. The article also discusses how MCA helps explore issues of for-me-ness, transparency of perceptual consciousness, and possible immediacy and non-relationality of self-consciousness. (shrink)

This project aims to examine whether music has an emotional nature. I use the ancient Chinese text Music Has No Grief or Joy to construct three arguments for the illusion view, according to which music has no emotional nature and the emotional appearances of music are illusory. These arguments highlight representational inconstancy, expressive incapability, and evocative underdetermination as three ways to problematize the idea that music has an emotional nature. I draw on the Confucian tradition to formulate three responses to (...) the illusion view from representational reliability, expressive sincerity, and evocative appropriateness. These responses are shown to be inadequate. To examine the illusion view in detail, I adopt a comparative approach to structure a dialogue between ancient Eastern philosophy and contemporary Western philosophy. Nine arguments are constructed from three prominent approaches in contemporary Western musical aesthetics on the evocation, expression, and representation of emotion. I argue that each of these arguments reads emotion into music. Nevertheless, three insights emerge from the comparative discussion. The autonomy of emotional enjoyment, the possibility of emotional communication, and the function of emotional language in musical experiences call for explanations. I argue that the illusion view are amenable to these insights. The illusion view allows us to claim full ownership of emotional responses, have emotional communication by recognizing intended emotional meanings in music, and appreciate the practical value of emotional language in music industry and education. I formulate a possible objection on the basis of Charles Swann’s musical experience in Marcel Proust’s novel, according to which music has emotional agency in the formation of an emotion. This objection can be met and Swann’s musical experience can be integrated into the illusion view. The illusion view turns out to be experientially richer than it might appear at first. This project liberates musical listening and philosophical thinking from beliefs entrenched in the emotional illusion of music. (shrink)

The contributions in the first part Re-modelling logic of this volume take account of formal logic in the theory of rational argumentation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Converging Ways? Conversion and Belonging in Buddhism and ChrisitanityCatherine CornilleConverging Ways? Conversion and Belonging in Buddhism and Chrisitanity. By John D’Arcy May. Sankt Ottilien: EOS Klosterverlag, 2007. 207 pp.In the course of the past seven years, the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies has established itself as a locus of serious dialogue and creative religious reflection. This volume, which emerged out of the sixth conference (in 2005) at the (...) Benedictine Abbey of St. Ottilien in Germany, combines a diversity of contributions on various issues relating to conversion, religious belonging, and multiple religious belonging. At the heart of the volume are two responses (by Christian theologian Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Buddhist theologian José Cabezón) to the highly publicized conversion of Paul Williams from Tantric Buddhism to Roman Catholicism, followed by a reply by Williams himself. These three articles represent a powerful demonstration of religious apologetics at its best. Each offers their critique of the other from a clearly defined religious position, displaying a clear understanding of the views of the other, but arguing unabashedly for the validity or superiority of their own position or theological convictions. Somewhat missing in the reading is an account of Williams’s conversion story, which he developed in An Unexpected Way. But each of the discussants offers a clear enough account of the other so that even those who have not read the book are able to reconstruct the main points of Williams’s narrative and arguments. Against Williams, who juxtaposes Buddhist atheism with Christian theism, Schmidt-Leukel proposes a conception of the absolute which he believes is amenable to both, but which—as Williams later argues—may be representative of neither. Cabezón, for his part, focuses not only on Williams’s theological arguments, but also on his ethical arguments for the superiority of Christianity, objecting that the black-and-white picture presented in a conversion narrative often entails a distortion or oversimplification of the tradition left behind, and pointing to the importance of interconnection and love in Buddhist texts and traditions. While conceding the latter, Williams, in his retort, passionately and eloquently reiterates his arguments for the plausibility of the Christian conception of God, countering one by one the points raised by his respondents. In this, he draws almost exclusively on Thomas Aquinas, which gives power and focus to his arguments but also seems to ignore the presence of other theological voices within the Christian and Roman Catholic tradition. This exercise in apologetics is interesting, not only because of the contents of the arguments, but also because of the tone. While Williams pays heed to Cabezón, [End Page 161] who approaches his conversion from a clearly defined Buddhist perspective, he seems less respectful of the position of Schmidt-Leukel, who attempts to reconcile Buddhist and Christian views of God. The reasons why such reconciliations are unappealing for someone who has converted from the one religion to the other may be many. But it certainly points to the tensions between clear commitment and belonging to a particular religious and theological tradition and the rhetoric of multiple religious belonging.This brings us to some of the other articles collected in this volume. Some focus on the lived reality of multiple belonging in Korea (Thomas Timpte) or in Sweden (Kajsa Ahlstrand) while others focus on personal experience (Thomas Josef Gotz and Ruben Habito) or on the religious or theological grounds for multiple religious belonging (Jorgen Skov Sorensen and Michael von Bruck). All of these contributions point to the reality or the ideality of belonging to more than one religious tradition. It would appear that in the context of religious diversity, such multiple belonging is all but unavoidable. While some point to the false construction of religious boundaries, others dismiss all notions of religious and theological superiority as well as the centrality of truth in religion. In contrast with this, the robust theological debate on matters of truth and difference at the heart of this volume offers a healthy counterbalance and a welcome reminder of the categorical and at times conflicting claims to truth in religion. If religions are taken seriously, multiple religious identity is less evident than sociological data... (shrink)

The ongoing incidence of schizophrenia is considered a paradox, as the disorder has genetic basis yet confers survival handicaps. Researchers have not reached consensus regarding theories explaining this contradiction. Major evolutionary theories hypothesize that schizophrenia is: a byproduct of other evolutionary processes, linked to survival advantages that counteract disadvantages, associated with processes such as shamanism conferring advantages to groups, a consequence of modern environments, a result of random processes, such as mutations. A null hypothesis argues that philosophical or methodological problems (...) render evolutionary paradigms inappropriate. These arguments are reviewed in light of an experience-centered approach, which regards experiential accounts as data. A ritual healing theory, derived from this orientation, has bearing on evolutionary theories pertaining to schizophrenia. This theory explains the nature of shamanism, which has features coinciding with schizophrenia. The ritual healing theory is supported by folklore, medical, and anthropological evidence, is amenable to empirical evaluation, and has clinical applications. (shrink)

Reasoning with the maximally consistent subsets of the premises is a well-known approach for handling contradictory information. In this paper we consider several variations of this kind of reasoning, for each one we introduce two complementary computational methods that are based on logical argumentation theory. The difference between the two approaches is in their ways of making consequences: one approach is of a declarative nature and is related to Dung-style semantics for abstract argumentation, while the other (...) approach has a more proof-theoretical flavor, extending Gentzen-style sequent calculi. The outcome of this work is a new perspective on reasoning with MCS, which shows a strong link between the latter and argumentation systems, and which can be generalized to some related formalisms. As a by-product of this we obtain soundness and completeness results for the dynamic proof systems with respect to several of Dung’s semantics. In a broader context, we believe that this work helps to better understand and evaluate the role of logic-based instantiations of argumentation frameworks. (shrink)

Racist beliefs express value judgments. According to an influential view, value judgments are subjective, and not amenable to rational adjudication. In contrast, we argue that the value judgments expressed in, for example, racist beliefs, are false and objectively so. Our account combines a naturalized, philosophical account of meaning inspired by Donald Davidson, with a prominent social-psychological theory of values pioneered by the social-psychologist Milton Rokeach. We use this interdisciplinary approach to show that, just as with beliefs expressing descriptive (...) judgments, beliefs expressing value judgments have empirical content, or can be inferentially linked to beliefs that do; the truth or falsity of that content can be objectively assigned; and that assignment is amenable to rational assessment. While versions of this objective view of value judgments have been defended by moral realists of various metaphysical stripes, our argument has the virtue of appealing, instead, to accounts that are as naturalistically informed as possible. And, unlike the influential subjective view of value judgments, and racist beliefs more particularly, our arguments are better able to account for instances where rational, persuasive strategies have been effective in reducing the ubiquity of racism in American culture. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and (...) refugees in headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

Many ethicists endorse a character-based approach to business ethics (CBE). This approach includes a focus on the development of particular traits of character amenable to virtuous business practices. Situationists claim, however, that traditional understandings of character are challenged by various findings in empirical psychology. While defenders of CBE have responded this claim, these responses are very similar to those made in defense of a more general virtue ethical theory against situationist arguments. I argue that whatever promise such (...) responses to situationism have in defending a general virtue ethical theory, they are not up to the task of defending CBE. As a result, CBE is in need of novel responses to situationism or significant revision. (shrink)

Since the end of the last century, there has been several ambitious attempts to naturalize Husserlian phenomenology by way of mathematization. To justify themselves in view of Husserl’s adamant antinaturalism, many of these attempts appeal to the new physico-mathematical tools that were unknown in Husserl’s time and thus allegedly make his position outdated. This paper critically addresses these mathematization proposals and aims to show that Husserl had, in fact, sufficiently good arguments that make his antinaturalistic position sound even today. The (...) starting point of the discussion presented in this paper is the mathematization project introduced by Jean-Michel Roy, Jean Petitot, Bernard Pachoud, and Francisco Varela in their introduction to the book Naturalizing Phenomenology. This proposal was followed by a number of critiques but also by several alternative naturalization attempts clearly inspired by Roy et al.’s ambitious project. The review of some of Husserl’s important arguments often overlooked or misinterpreted by both the naturalization advocates and their critics leads the author of the paper to the twofold conclusion which, on the one hand, explores the deeper reasons for the impossibility of a physical and mathematical treatment of phenomenology, on the other hand, clarifies the sense in which such treatments are possible, namely by way of restriction of the variety of experiential aspects that undergo naturalization and substitution of the aspects amenable to the direct mathematization for the directly unmathematizable ones. In the fourth section of this paper, the author attempts to demonstrate that, contrary to widespread belief, Husserl’s arguments are not obsolete by the standards of the contemporary physico-mathematical approaches employed in the mathematization of phenomenology and indeed stand the test of time. (shrink)

This theoretical study examines the ethics of international nurse recruitment from the conceptual framework of stakeholder interests. It argues that there are stakeholders at individual, institutional, national and international levels, with overlapping but, more often, different or even conflicting interests. Depending on the interests of given stakeholders, different conclusions regarding the ethics of international nurse recruitment may be reached. There is no right or wrong with these varying ethical positions because they reflect different beliefs and philosophies that are not (...) class='Hi'>amenable to value judgment. To illustrate and support this line of argument, this article analyzes the underpinnings of two ethical standards published by the International Council of Nurses and the UK Department of Health. In addition, a case study on China augments the argument by demonstrating limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach to the issue. The most important question in understanding and evaluating the ethical standards of international nurse recruitment is to know whose interests they are designed to represent and protect. (shrink)

This paper considers Dan Sperber’s arguments that a more scientific, ‘natural’, approach to anthropology might be pursued by abstracting from interpretive questions as much as possible, and replacing them with questions amenable to a cognitive psychological investigation. It attempts to show that Sperber’s main argument rests on controversial assumptions about the nature of the mental states that are ascribed within our commonsense psychological practices and that any theoretical psychology that accepts these assumptions will be revisionist concerning mental concepts. (...) Sperber is right to point out that there must be constraints on what should count as appropriate interpretations of cultural phenomena. It is argued however, that in hoping to assimilate anthropological investigations to scientific ones, Sperber misconstrues the nature of anthropological claims. (shrink)

I develop here one of the many topics raised by Sass, Parnas, and Zahavi, namely the role of phenomenology in clarifying issues not amenable to standard empirical methods. The authors of this scholarly paper mainly tackle this issue from the angle of psychopathological research in schizophrenia. I would like to build on their argument, having in mind one dimension of clinical phenomenology that has not been approached in their paper: the issue of care, that is the use of the (...) method implemented by clinical phenomenology in the therapeutic setting.I first briefly outline some methodological principles of clinical phenomenology in the context of psychopathological research that may be implemented in the context of .. (shrink)

This paper examines the views of Fogelin, Woods, Johnstone, etc., concerning deep disa-greements, force-five standoffs, philosophical controversies, etc. My approach is to reconstruct their views and critiques of them as meta-arguments, and to elaborate the meta-argumentative aspects of radical disa-greements. It turns out that deep disagreements are resolvable to a greater degree than usually thought, but only by using special principles and practices, such as meta-argumentation, ad hominem argumentation, Ramsey’s principle, etc.

With the growing use of the Social Web, an increasing number of applications for exchanging opinions with other people are becoming available online. These applications are widely adopted with the consequence that the number of opinions about the debated issues increases. In order to cut in on a debate, the participants need first to evaluate the opinions of the other users to detect whether they are in favour or against the debated issue. Bipolar argumentation proposes algorithms and semantics to (...) evaluate the set of accepted arguments, given the support and the attack relations among them. Two main problems arise. First, an automated framework to detect the relations among the arguments represented by the natural language (NL) formulation of the users’ opinions is needed. Our paper addresses this open issue by proposing and evaluating the use of NL techniques to identify the arguments and their relations. In particular, we adopt the textual entailment (TE) approach, a generic framework for applied semantics, where linguistic objects are mapped by means of semantic inferences at a textual level. TE is then coupled together with an abstract bipolar argumentation system which allows to identify the arguments that are accepted in the considered online debate. Second, we address the problem of studying and comparing the different proposals put forward for modelling the support relation. The emerging scenario shows that there is not a unique interpretation of the support relation. In particular, different combinations of additional attacks among the arguments involved in a support relation are proposed. We provide an NL account of the notion of support based on online debates, by discussing and evaluating the support relation among arguments with respect to the more specific notion of TE in the NL processing field. Finally, we carry out a comparative evaluation of four proposals of additional attacks on a sample of NL arguments extracted from Debatepedia. The originality of the proposed framework lies in the following point: NL debates are analysed and the relations among the arguments are automatically extracted. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.1 (2001) 17-19 [Access article in PDF] A Kleinian Contribution to the External World Robert D. Hinshelwood Radical feminism overstates its case and ignores the importance of individual psychology; at the same time, an individual psychology like psychoanalysis lacks a broader perspective that feminism might supply. Sarah Richmond's paper advocates a mutual enhancement of both psychoanalysis and feminism by combining the two perspectives. It is (...) a version of the old controversy over social influences versus innate influences--nature versus nurture.Richmond's thesis places a stress on the kind of psychoanalysis that might be most amenable to a reconciliation between social and psychological causations of individual attitudes. Interestingly, she argues that Kleinian psychoanalysis, which, by reputation, gives the greatest emphasis to the internal world of individuals, is the most suited for any reconciliation with the social--an argument that I would in fact endorse. It is simply because Kleinian psychoanalysis dwells on the internal world as a little society of internal beings that it may be most suited to bringing into contact with social explanations.One important dimension of this kind of reconciliation is that the world of internal objects (a kind of internal society) and the world of social persons could be seen in some correspondence, and indeed in the Kleinian view, there is a real correspondence between the two. That correspondence is actively and continuously mediated by phantasies of internalizing or externalizing persons and internal objects. The interchange can profoundly alter an individuals' internal objects, an influence determined by the external world of other persons and vice versa.This kind of correspondence between internal and external worlds (the individual and the social) can accomplish a mutual influencing of perceptions of other people and of the self. It can be the mechanism for the development of sets of attitudes on a social/cultural basis--including attitudes to gender. Similarly, the internalization of actual relations that exist between persons becomes the individual's accepted expectations of relationships, including sexual and erotic ones.The whole exchange process of internalization and externalization involves a primary evaluation of persons/objects and of the relations between them. Kleinian psychoanalysis argues that a primary function of the earliest ego in the individual is to evaluate objects as good or bad. Gendered persons are then internalized as objects having high or low values.Richmond exemplifies the necessary convergence of social and individual/personal points of view by considering the personal experiences that occur in anorexia. Clearly, the incidence of eating disorders varies between the genders, and the implication is that this is in part socially aroused--especially through the use of slender female bodies [End Page 17] in advertising and fashion. But also it is clearly mediated through individual agency (albeit probably the unconscious motivations known to psychoanalysts). Two Kleinian authors are examined to explore the possibilities of this kind of analysis.Richmond's thesis is applicable to gender relations in important ways, enriching both the psychoanalytic and socio-economic approaches that she is concerned with. However, where more work needs to be done, it seems to me, is in terms of power relations. Power relations are not theorized in psychoanalysis. There is thus little from the individual point of view that can contribute to a feminist analysis of power. And indeed this might be one significant point that Richmond refers to, where psychoanalysis can learn something from the social point of view.Elsewhere I have tried to conceptualize what a Kleinian view of power relations might be. 1 The account of Kleinian psychoanalysis above and in Richmond concerns the interchange of persons and internal objects, but we must also take account of Klein's descriptions of the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein 1946). There, the exchange of parts of the self with other persons is central. As an example, the study of institutionalization as an interpersonal process indicates an exchange between certain sub-groups within an institution of active and powerful parts of the self, as well the interchange of weak and submissive parts of the self. In a mental hospital, for instance, this ends... (shrink)

Many of us have a prereflective sense--or at least, a hope--that there are reasons to be moral which apply to an agent regardless of what his or her existing motivations may be. The view that there are no such reasons may, then, be regarded as a form of moral scepticism. The philosophical position which seems most fit to refute this form of moral scepticism, and hence to support our prereflective sense, is a Kantian view of morality, according to which we (...) are required to be moral solely in virtue of being rational. I examine a number of recent arguments for this position; I conclude that all of them fail, and for similar reasons. Nor, I argue, is there any non-Kantian view which could succeed at the same task. It is thus very tempting to infer that this form of moral scepticism is immune to any simple refutation. However, perhaps the best way to combat scepticism is not to argue for its negation--as do the positions examined so far--but to show that there is something problematic in the sceptic's whole approach to the issue. At this point I turn for enlightenment to an analogy with epistemological scepticism. Here, too, if we try to argue for the negation of scepticism, we seem bound to fail; but here the more subtle strategy of attacking the sceptic's whole approach has actually been attempted. I sketch a number of versions of this more subtle strategy; I then sketch some analogous responses to moral scepticism, and consider whether any of them are successful. I argue that the attempt fails--that even if epistemological scepticism is indeed amenable to this kind of treatment , moral scepticism is not. This conclusion is only strengthened when I argue that another, related strategy, which employs an analogy between morality and mathematics, also falls short at the same point. Moral scepticism therefore survives intact. The appropriate reaction, I suggest, is neither complete despair nor complete equanimity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cause, Fault, NormJohn Z. Sadler (bio)Keywordscriminality, mental disorder, responsibilityThanks to the commentators for their fine work. In my brief comments I cannot address all that is raised, but can touch upon everyone’s discussion briefly.In her commentary, Gwen Adshead reflects on her experience as a forensic psychiatrist and therapist for violent offenders. Although Adshead discusses a number of important points, I found her insight into why some vices find their (...) way into psychiatric classification particularly compelling and thought provoking. I will here interpret these in my own terms. Dr. Adshead implies that a (perhaps) assumed folk psychology underlies our motivation to classify (as disorder) some, but not all vices. The contribution of this folk psychology does not depend on particular details, but rather, the folk psychology concerns the degree to which the vice–actor’s actions are amenable to explanation, or are transparently understandable or interpretable. We (think we) understand why prostitutes sell themselves and why tax evaders cheat; their folk psychologies are variously constituted by moralistic constructs like desperation, oppression, licentiousness, greed, opportunism, and indignation. In contrast, some offenses step outside our empathic realm: the pedophile, or the serial killer, or even the persistently acting-out child provoke onlookers to wonder, “There has to be something wrong with a person who does that!” “Loud” symptoms in themselves do not qualify; seemingly incomprehensible loud symptoms fit better into the “sick” category. Indeed, in a recent translation of Foucault’s lectures at the College de France, Foucault describes the “monster” as combining “the impossible and the forbidden.” (Foucault 1999, 56) When confronted with the impossible and forbidden, the lust for classification is irresistible.Adshead’s wonderment about the use of “really” to question the explanation of wrongful conduct (what’s “really” going on) leads naturally to Michael First’s discussion. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-IV really tries to make a firm distinction between vice and mental disorder, and First describes the DSM approach.Drawing on his experience as the DSM-IV Text Editor, Dr. First provides a particularly lucid presentation of the distinction between what I call “vice” and mental disorder. He supplies vivid examples to illustrate his points. The DSM key for distinguishing disorder from vice is whether “the deviance or conflict is a symptom of a dysfunction in the individual.” As other commentators point out later, First notes that the “vice action” (a term coined by Morse in his own commentary following) may disguise a number of possible explanations: the car thief may simply be seeking thrills and profit, or may be motivated by a delusion—leading to alternative explanations for the behavior. Sometimes the explanation for vice actions are transparent—as in the red Mustang example, but other times they are not so clear. The DSM approach requires the clinician to [End Page 51] make an explanatory claim in order to distinguish the appearance of vice versus the appearance of disorder. I think everyone would agree that an explanation of the phenomenon is required in distinguishing vice from disorder, so that much can be accepted.In my view, the problems with the DSM account are three: (1) The requirement for an internal psychological dysfunction is an easy claim to make for virtually any vice condition. The prostitute’s vice may be attributable to childhood trauma, deviant social learning, pathological desire to sexually control others, and so on. The tax evader may in turn have a pathological resentment of authority combined with a desperate financial situation and a pathological denial and avoidance of paying taxes. Every misbehavior has its psychology, and if we proclaim this psychology is abnormal or deviant, then we have an “internal dysfunction.” Indeed, it is easy to proclaim a psychology as abnormal if it is less than an ideal response to circumstances, or even an adequate response to circumstances; after all, not everyone who is exposed to sexual trauma becomes a prostitute nor does every financially desperate individual cheat on taxes. The DSM’s overinclusiveness on this account defaults to an arbitrariness about what counts as a legitimate (or not) internal dysfunction. Here there will be great argument.(2) First (and later, Wells) admits there... (shrink)

It is a challenge in teaching early modern philosophy to balance historical faithfulness to the arguments and concerns of early modern philosophers and interpreting them as relevant to the kinds of thinking that contemporary undergraduate students find plausible. Early modern philosophy is unique, however, in applying modern scientific method directly to problems concerning nonphysical aspects of reality that our contemporary scientific thought, and with it mainstream contemporary culture, no longer find amenable in their own, independent right to reliable reasoned (...) approaches. At the same time, early modern philosophy often also takes seriously purely conceptual or logically consequential thought in the investigation of these topics, as our mainstream contemporary culture does not. This kind of thought, we argue, is distinctive of philosophy in general and appropriate to nonphysical aspects of reality. Early modern philosophy, then, offers a bridge between the kind of reasoned, objective thought our mainstream culture finds plausible and thought about nonphysical reality or, in general, the thought that characterizes philosophy. (shrink)

The Ambiguity of ‘Post-Secular’ and ‘Post-Metaphysical’ Stories: On the Place of Religion and Deep Commitments in a Secular Society Words are always important, all over the world. On October 15, 1989, Vaclav Havel underlined their utmost importance in his acceptance speech of the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association, entitled ‘A Word about Words’. But he gave us at once a warning: ‘The same word can be humble at one moment and arrogant the next. And a humble word can (...) be transformed easily and imperceptibly into an arrogant one, whereas it is a difficult and protracted process to transform an arrogant word into one that is humble.’ In this essay, my intention is to focus on two words, ‘post-secular’ and ‘post-metaphysical’, as coined by Jürgen Habermas. I would like to raise the question whether they are still humble words or whether they are already surreptitiously transformed into arrogant ones. Undoubtedly, Habermas sees the words ‘post-secular’ and ‘post-metaphysical’ as intertwined and he originally framed them as humble expressions of a balanced position. But both words are poly-interpretable. They can be humble at one moment and arrogant the next. Since words are never innocent and their interpretation determines which view on the role of world-views, including religions, will prevail in contemporary society, a painstaking interpretation of both words is important. Mainly inspired by Charles Taylor’s approach, I will trace the consequences of divergent interpretations of these two words as to the role of religious (part I) and metaphysical arguments or ‘deep commitments’ (part II) in the current debate on the place of religion in the public sphere. I will suggest that the controversy around the interpretation of both words is not only due to different epistemological premises, but to divergent political stances as well (part III). Finally, I will claim that achieving mutual respect and tolerance in this regard is less amenable to the neutrality of procedural rationality than to the imaginative force of subtle words (part IV). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian ReformationGiving a Hearing to The Parallax ViewAdrian Johnston (bio)Slavoj Žižek. THE PARALLAX VIEW. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006. [PV]Near the end of a two-hour presentation at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 10, 2006, Slavoj Žižek confesses that, in terms of the intellectual ambitions nearest to his heart, “my secret dream is to be Hegel’s Luther” [“Why Only an Atheist Can Believe”]. This confession comes (...) just months after the publication of his latest major work, The Parallax View, a book described as a new magnum opus. There are ample justifications within this text to license retroactively rereading it through the lens of Žižek’s subsequent public admission that he is now preoccupied with rescuing Hegel from the numerous misinterpretations to which this giant of German idealism (who casts such a long shadow over the Continental European philosophical tradition) has been repeatedly subjected over the past two hundred years. The Parallax View, at certain points explicitly and in other places implicitly, can be seen as centered on an effort to confront aggressively the various received versions of Hegel widely accepted as official and orthodox exegetical renditions. The motif of the “parallax gap,” elaborated in a plethora of guises throughout this 2006 tome, condenses and reflects the axiomatic theses of what could be called Žižek’s Hegelian reformation.The critical assessment of The Parallax View offered here seeks to go straight to its theoretical heart by highlighting a single line of argumentation running through the full span of this text’s different moments and phases. Žižek’s own Hegelian-style conceptions of truth (as fiercely partisan rather than calmly neutral) and universality (as immanently concrete rather than transcendently abstract) validate such an interpretive approach—“universal Truth is accessible only from a partial engaged subjective position” [PV 35]. Deliberately extracting particular conceptual constellations and forcing them to link up with each other according to the plan of a certain directed philosophical agenda promises to be much more revealing of the essential features of Žižekian thought than a comprehensive survey of this latest of his major works.The specific argumentative thread to be isolated here is the new extended engagement with the terrain covered by cognitive science and the neurosciences. Apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of Žižek’s other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped out over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary (a theory informed by Kant and post-Kantian German idealism combined with Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology). And, herein, the articulation of such an ontology appropriately gets entangled, via reflections on the nature of the brain, with the latest instantiations of the perennial philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and [End Page 3] body. Žižek grants that the central nervous system is, in at least several undeniable and important senses, the material, corporeal ground of the subject, the bodily being without which there cannot be the parlêtre (speaking being). But, in the spirit of Schelling and Hegel (especially their philosophies of “productive” nature), the fashions in which Žižek attempts to tie together systematically a materialist ontology with an account of more-than-material, transontological subjectivity illuminate a normally obscured and ignored set of implied consequences flowing from the gesture of dissolving hard-and-fast dualist distinctions between body and mind, nature and spirit.The past few decades of philosophical engagement with the neurosciences, an engagement almost completely monopolized by the Anglo-American Analytic philosophical tradition and neglected by the Continental European philosophical tradition to an equal degree, has emphasized (to put this in the vernacular of German idealism) the naturalization of spirit resulting from the collapse of any strict nature-spirit dichotomy. The materialisms promoted by those Analytic philosophers amenable to grounding the mental on the neuronal simply assume that the outcome of folding mind and matter into each other is a becoming-material of the mind, namely, a naturalization of the spirit (that is, the mind comes to resemble the brain conceived of as just another part... (shrink)

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is inappropriate as an aid to Covid policy-making because the plural, incommensurable values at stake are not all amenable to monetary measurement. CBA for Covid policy is also undermined by pervasive uncertainty and ignorance, and has some troubling distributional implications. However, non-consequentialist alternatives to CBA tend towards implausibly absolutist prohibitions on risk imposition. Arguments for setting aside consequentialism for special circumstances (the precautionary principle, or a medical rule of rescue) are also problematic when applied to Covid (...) policy. A broad consequentialist approach to policy guidance is defended, one which does not demand commensuration on a common monetary scale. Despite the absence of commensuration, policy guidance is still possible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Montaignian MomentDan EngsterIn the Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock argued that the development of modern republican theory was closely bound up with a paradigmatic shift in the early modern discourse of temporality and politics. 1 Whereas medieval thinkers tended to emphasize the supreme importance of eternal and universal principles in politics, the Italian civic humanists turned their attention to the stream of contingent temporal events ruled by (...) “fortune” and claimed human beings could create a stable political order within time through their own “virtue.” 2 The exemplar of this new paradigm was Machiavelli. In contrast to earlier humanist writers who still appealed to timeless values and static ideals in laying out their political theories, Machiavelli reframed his political discourse entirely in terms of contingency and fortune. “The Machiavellian moment,” Pocock wrote, “is a name for the moment in conceptualized time in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability.” 3 The importance of the Machiavellian moment, according to Pocock, was that it “left an important paradigmatic legacy” to modern political thought. Mach-iavelli’s new understanding of temporality and politics has “continued to pose problems in historical self-awareness, which form part of the journey of Western thought from the medieval Christian to the modern historical mode,” and his political strategies for taming fortune laid the foundation for the development of modern republican theory. 4 [End Page 625]Victoria Kahn has recently suggested several correctives to Pocock’s thesis. 5 Most importantly, she has criticized him for emphasizing the republican dimensions of Machiavelli’s thought while discounting the amoral or “Machiavellian” aspects of it. “For if Machiavellism is a rhetoric for conceptualizing and responding to the realm of contingency,” she has written, “it includes not only republicanism but also tyranny; it involves the use of force and fraud not only to advance one’s self interest but also to serve the commonwealth.” 6 According to Kahn, the “paradigm” which Machiavelli defined was not strictly republican but rather a broadly “activist” ideology amenable to a number of different causes. 7 But in this broader sense, she has continued to endorse Pocock’s assertion that Machiavelli’s approach to the problem of fortune and contingency was widely influential, or “paradigmatic,” in framing early modern political debates.In this article I suggest that Machiavelli’s arguments represented only one important shift in the discourse of temporality and politics in early modern Europe. During the late sixteenth century a second shift occurred; the exemplar of this new paradigm was Michel de Montaigne. 8 In his Essays Montaigne argued that Machiavelli and the civic humanists had grossly underestimated the capriciousness and uncertainty of fortune. He then challenged the effectiveness of traditional humanist strategies for establishing order within time and proposed a new set of principles for taming fortune based upon the concept of “nature” and the values of moderation, restraint, and self-discipline. I argue that no less than Machiavelli, Montaigne left an important paradigmatic legacy to later writers. He was one of the first early modern writers to suggest that human beings ought not to focus so much on trying actively to manipulate fortune. Instead, he felt that the aim should be more on attempting to construct self-sufficient and self-regulating communities that would avoid her blows altogether. In this respect he may be seen as a central transitional figure between the activist humanism of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and the more rationalistic state theories of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or more succinctly, between Machiavelli and Hobbes. The “Montaignian moment” outlined an alternative discourse of temporality and politics that provided a theoretical framework for the development and justification of the new language of the state. [End Page 626]Montaigne is not usually regarded as an important political thinker, let alone as a “paradigmatic” one. There have been two recent studies, however, that have attempted to situate his ideas in the history of early modern political thought. David Schaefer has argued that Montaigne was a proponent of republican ideas... (shrink)

This article addresses the role and meaning of prayer as well as the language of piety and praise in Nietzsche’s writings, notably in Zarathustra. This essay was first presented as a talk in German at the 2017 Nietzsche colloquium in Sils Maria, the theme of which was “Zarathustra und Dionysos”. In preparing it for a publication in English, the argument has been reworked and expanded and references have been added, while partly preserving the tone and structure of the oral delivery. (...) I am grateful to the instructive comments and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers for Nietzsche-Studien. Nietzsche can be read as an uncompromising critic of religion but also as the initiator of a new form of faith, described by some scholars as a “Dionysian piety”. The analysis takes its lead from the way in which Z refers to his yes-saying as also saying “amen”, exploring how Nietzsche explicitly incorporates the language of religious discourse into his writing. Examining passages where he explicitly questions the adoption of confessional language and prayer, it criticizes as overly simplistic the view of his thinking as seeking a new piety. The discussion of the significance of prayer from a psychological, linguistic, and poetological perspective highlights the experience of “inspiration” as a key to the adoption of confessional language in Z. In an interpretation of the last part of this book, it shows how its concluding scenes coalesce precisely around the role and possibility of prayer and piety, and how a crisis in the narrative is triggered by the inability of Zarathustra’s visitors to properly understand his message in this regard. A concluding interpretation of the section “Before Sunrise” in the third part of the book shows how it gathers the philosophical stakes involved in Nietzsche’s understanding of prayer, piety, and confessional praise. (shrink)

According to several prominent philosophers, pleasure and pain come in measurable quantities. This thesis is controversial, however, and many philosophers have presented or felt compelled to respond to arguments for the conclusion that it is false. One important class of these arguments concerns the problem of aggregation, which says that if pleasure and pain were measurable quantities, then, by definition, it would be possible to perform various mathematical and statistical operations on numbers representing amounts of them. It is sometimes argued (...) that such operations cannot be sensibly applied to pleasure and pain, and that sentences expressing such operations must be false or meaningless. The purpose of this paper is to present, explain, and rebut several versions of this argument. In the first section, I present a generic version of the argument. In the second section, I present a defense of its key premise based on a case involving comparisons of relief from pain, and explain why I think it fails. In the third section, I present and rebut another defense, based on a pair of analogies with temperature. In the final section, I present a third defense, based on an analogy with spatial distances. I then present my reasons for rejecting it. Along the way, I explain my reasons for thinking that pleasure and pain are amenable to interval measurement. (shrink)

Presupposition has been described in the literature as closely related to the listener’s knowledge and the speaker’s beliefs regarding the other’s mind. However, how is it possible to know or believe our interlocutor’s knowledge? The purpose of this paper is to find an answer to this question by showing the relationship between reasoning, presumption and language. Presupposition is analyzed as twofold reasoning process: on the one hand, the speaker by presupposing a proposition presumes that his interlocutor knows it; on the (...) other hand, the listener reconstructs the propositions taken for granted and assesses them against the shared presumptions. The possibility of reconstructing a presupposition is distinguished from its assessment, where the consistency of the presupposition with the shared or common ground is evaluated, and its reasonableness established. The analysis of presuppositions from an argumentative perspective provides an instrument for evaluating the reasonableness of a presupposition and understanding its dialogical effect. On this view, the dialogical force of a presupposition lies in its presumptive nature, which sets and shifts the burden of proving its unacceptability or unreasonableness. (shrink)

This paper makes use of the concepts and theoretical framework developed within the field of Argumentation Theory to account for the structure and characteristics of abduction and of the comparative processes of weighing explanatory hypothesis. It elaborates an analysis of abduction based on its consideration as a meta-explanatory argumentation scheme while elucidating its relations with abductive reasoning and inference. The conceptualization of comparative processes of weighing explanatory hypothesis as complex and varied argumentative structures is presented as an alternative (...) to the idea of providing a formally rigid and supposedly universal account of ‘inference to the best explanation’. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 220 Seiten: 155-172.

This essay begins with a critique of the Critical-Logical model dominant in contemporary argumentation theory. The concerns raised stem primarily from considerations brought by several feminist thinkers including Carol Gilligan, Karen Warren, Deborah Tannen and, most especially, Andrea Nye. It is argued that, in light of these considerations, and concerns of essentialism or non-essentialism notwithstanding, that the Critical-Logical model is liable to dis-enfranchise a significant part of the population with regard to modes and styles of reasoning. The solution is (...) found in coalescent reasoning, an approach to argumentation that focuses on finding agreement rather than emphasizing disagreement and criticism. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to develop general criteria of argumentative validity and adequacy for probabilistic arguments on the basis of the epistemological approach to argumentation. In this approach, as in most other approaches to argumentation, proabilistic arguments have been neglected somewhat. Nonetheless, criteria for several special types of probabilistic arguments have been developed, in particular by Richard Feldman and Christoph Lumer. In the first part (sects. 2-5) the epistemological basis of probabilistic arguments is discussed. (...) With regard to the philosophical interpretation of probabilities a new subjectivist, epistemic interpretation is proposed, which identifies probabilities with tendencies of evidence (sect. 2). After drawing the conclusions of this interpretation with respect to the syntactic features of the probability concept, e.g. one variable referring to the data base (sect. 3), the justification of basic probabilities (priors) by judgements of relative frequency (sect. 4) and the justification of derivative probabilities by means of the probability calculus are explained (sect. 5). The core of the paper is the definition of '(argumentatively) valid derivative probabilistic arguments', which provides exact conditions for epistemically good probabilistic arguments, together with conditions for the adequate use of such arguments for the aim of rationally convincing an addressee (sect. 6). Finally, some measures for improving the applicability of probabilistic reasoning are proposed (sect. 7). (shrink)

The paper develops a classificatory system of basic argument types on the basis of the epis-temological approach to argumentation. This approach has provided strict rules for several kinds of argu-ments. These kinds may be brought into a system of basic irreducible types, which rely on different parts of epistemology: deductive logic, probability theory, utility theory. The system reduces a huge mass of differ-ent argument schemes to basic types and gives them an epistemological foundation.

Rather than the art of putting forward logically valid arguments leading to Truth, argumentation is here viewed as the use of verbal means ensuring an agreement on what can be considered reasonable by a given group, on a more or less controversial matter. What is acceptable and plausible is always coconstructed by subjects engaging in verbal interaction. It is the dynamism of this exchange, realized not only in natural language, but also in a specific cultural framework, that has to (...) be accounted for. From this perspective, it is not enough to reconstruct patterns of reasoning. As logos is by definition both Reason and Language, abstract schemata have to be examined in their verbal realization in a given situation of discourse. Such an approach to arguments allows for a “thick” description taking into account their discursive and communicational aspects, as well as argumentation’s constitutive dialogism and its inscription in a set of common representations, opinions and beliefs (a doxa). This approach, exemplified by the analysis of a short text on stock options borrowed from the French newspaper Libération, is an attempt at establishing a dialogue between disciplines like argumentation theories, rhetorical criticism and discourse analysis. (shrink)

As argumentation theory has moved away from classical logic as a standard, sources have played an increasingly important role in the psychology of argumentation. Considering the connections between arguments and their sources is important for both descriptive and normative projects. This chapter draws together different strands of research in the psychology of argumentation and their differing views on source characteristics: namely, procedural rules, pragmatics, argumentation schemes and Bayesian Argumentation. We argue for a reconciliation of these (...) different approaches around a probabilistic notion of relevance. (shrink)

A popular three-stage argument appraisal strategy calls for (1) identifying the parts of the argument, (2) classifYing the argument as deductive, inductive, or some other type, and (3) appraising the argument using the standards appropriate for the type. This strategy fails for a number of reasons. I propose a comprehensive alternative approach that distinguishes between inductive, deductive, and other standards; calls for the successive application of standards combined with assumption-ascription, according to policies that depend for their selection on the (...) goals of the appraiser; and provides for qualified reasoning. (shrink)

In times of populist mistrust towards experts, it is important and the aim of the paper to ascertain the rationality of arguments from expert opinion and to reconstruct their rational foundations as well as to determine their limits. The foundational approach chosen is probabilistic. However, there are at least three correct probabilistic reconstructions of such argumentations: statistical inferences, Bayesian updating, and interpretive arguments. To solve this competition problem, the paper proposes a recourse to the arguments' justification strengths achievable in (...) the respective situation. (shrink)

The present volume collects novel approaches to two classical topics within verbal semantics, namely argument structure and the treatment of time and aspect.

The problems that arise from the presence of self-attacking ar- guments and odd-length cycles of attack within argumentation frameworks are widely recognized in the literature on defeasible argumentation. This paper introduces two simple semantics to capture different intuitions about what kinds of arguments should become justified in such scenarios. These semantics are modeled upon two extensions of argumentation frameworks, which we call sustainable and tolerant. Each one is constructed on the common ground of the powerful concept of (...) admissibility introduced by Dung in [10]. The novelty of this approach consists in viewing the admissibility of a subset of arguments as relative to potentially challenging subsets of arguments. Both sustainable and tolerant semantics are more credulous than preferred semantics (i.e. they justify at least the same arguments, and possibly more). Given certain sufficient conditions they coincide among them as well as with other semantics introduced by Dung. (shrink)

The growing influence of the visual media in contemporary society is quite alarming; hence, learning to explicate them is inevitable. This is a paradigm shift from verbal argumentation to visual argumentation. The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of visual analysis and visual literacy, a part of discourse analysis. Visuals employ a number of rhetorical devices; however, understanding the effectiveness of these devices is still a challenge. Adopting Visual Argumentation Theory, the article analyzes (...) argumentation in cartoons on the post-election violence that rocked Kenya in 2007/2008. From the analyses, it is concluded that visuals can argue as simply and forcefully as their verbal counterparts. The blending of caricature and portraiture makes them even more explicit as portraiture denotes the characters so that we can recognize who they are; caricature ridicules them, analogy attributes actions to them in a satirical or sarcastic way, and cultural memory is needed to access the reference to the analogies. Visuals are designed to make the reader think not only about the event or the people being portrayed but also about the message being communicated. This means visuals have the ability to stretch the truth beyond caricature or mere amusement. (shrink)