Louise Cummings

In the following discussion, I examine what constitutes the dialectical strain in Putnam’s thought. As part of this examination, I consider Putnam’s (1981) criticism of the fact/value dichotomy. I compare this criticism to Putnam’s analysis of the metaphysical realist’s position, a position which has occupied Putnam’s thinking more than any other philosophical stance. I describe how Putnam pursues a chargeof self-refutation against the metaphysical realist and against the proponent of a fact/value dichotomy, a charge which assumes dialectical significance. So it is that the self-refuting nature of these positions is linked to their unintelligibility. My conclusion relates Putnam’s dialectical project to his wider philosophical ambitions, ambitions which are influenced in large part by Wittgensteinian considerations.

The Covid-19 pandemic presents argumentation theorists with an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which people, agencies and governments respond to the emergence of a new virus. Reponses have revealed a range of judgements and decisions, not all of which are rationally warranted. This article will examine errors in reasoning, several of which have reduced the public’s compliance with important health measures. This article will also analyse rationally warranted reasoning about Covid-19 employed by public health agencies. In examining instances of good and bad reasoning during the Covid-19 pandemic, we can begin to construct a taxonomy of arguments that facilitated and hindered individual and collective responses during this public health emergency.

The study of the fallacies has changed almost beyond recognition since Charles Hamblin called for a radical reappraisal of this area of logical inquiry in his 1970 book Fallacies. The “witless examples of his forbears” to which Hamblin referred have largely been replaced by more authentic cases of the fallacies in actual use. It is now not unusual for fallacy and argumentation theorists to draw on actual sources for examples of how the fallacies are used in our everyday reasoning. However, an aspect of this move towards greater authenticity in the study of the fallacies, an aspect which has been almost universally neglected, is the attempt to subject the fallacies to empirical testing of the type which is more commonly associated with psychological experiments on reasoning. This paper addresses this omission in research on the fallacies by examining how subjects use two fallacies – circular argument and analogical argument – during a reasoning task in which subjects are required to consider a number of public health scenarios. Results are discussed in relation to a view of the fallacies as cognitive heuristics that facilitate reasoning in a context of uncertainty.

Few, if any, scientific inquiries are conducted against a background of complete knowledge, a background in which inquirers are in possession of the ‘full facts’ that relate to a particular question or issue. More often than not, scientists are compelled to conduct their deliberations in contexts of epistemic uncertainty, in which partial knowledge or even a total absence of knowledge characterise inquiry. Nowhere is this epistemic uncertainty more evident, or indeed more successfully controlled, than in the branch of scientific inquiry called epidemiology. In this paper, I examine how epidemiologists overcome the unique challenges to inquiry that are posed by epistemic uncertainty. In specific terms, I contend that epidemiologists employ analogical reasoning strategies in an attempt to advance their inquiries in situations that are epistemically uncertain. The context for my claims will be the early inquiries that were conducted into the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the United States. I argue that early scientific work in relation to HIV/AIDS was directly premised upon epidemiological investigations in which analogical reasoning with hepatitis B had featured significantly. I conclude that epidemiological investigations of AIDS exemplify the capacity of analogical reasoning to advance inquiry under conditions of epistemic uncertainty. To this extent, analogical reasoning should be a concern both to those who address practical problems of uncertainty management and to those who pursue theoretical debates within argumentation studies and epistemology.