-
17Thou Shalt Not Squander Life – Comparing Five Approaches to Argument StrengthStudies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 68 (1): 133-167. 2023.Different approaches analyze the strength of a natural language argument in different ways. This paper contrasts the dialectical, structural, probabilistic (or Bayesian), computational, and empirical approaches by exemplarily applying them to a single argumentative text (Epicureans on Squandering Life; Aikin & Talisse, 2019). Rather than pitching these approaches against one another, our main goal is to show the room for fruitful interaction. Our focus is on a dialectical analysis of the squande…Read more
-
12Identifying Linked and Convergent Argument StructuresInformal Logic 43 (4): 363-387. 2022.To analyze the argument structure, the linked vs convergent distinction is crucial. In applying this distinction, argumentation scholars test for variations of argument strength under premise revision. A relevance-based test assesses whether an argument’s premises are individually relevant to its conclusion, while a support-based test assesses whether premises support the conclusion independently. Both criteria presuppose that evaluating an argument’s strength is methodologically prior to identi…Read more
-
36Norms of Public Argumentation and the Ideals of Correctness and ParticipationArgumentation 38 (1): 7-40. 2024.Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principl…Read more
-
210In the context of discovery-oriented hypothesis testing research, behavioral scientists widely accept a convention for false positive (α) and false negative error rates (β) proposed by Jacob Cohen, who deemed the general relative seriousness of the antecedently accepted α = 0.05 to be matched by β = 0.20. Cohen’s convention not only ignores contexts of hypothesis testing where the more serious error is the β-error. Cohen’s convention also implies for discovery-oriented hypothesis testing researc…Read more
-
6This work contrasts conservative or minimally mutilating revisions of empirical theories as they are identified in the presently dominant AGM model of formal belief revision and the structuralist program for the reconstruction of empirical theories. The aim is to make understandable why both approaches only partly succeed in substantially informing and formally restraining the issue. With respect to the rationality of minimal change, the overall result is negative. Readers with an interest in fo…Read more
-
23A Scheme and Critical Questions for the argumentum ad baculumTopoi 42 (2): 527-541. 2023.Instances of the ad baculum argument (also known as the threat appeal argument or the argument from threat) are common in both private and public sphere discourse. Although contemporary argumentation scholarship recognizes these instances as contingently fallacious, the literature lacks not only a well-motivated ad baculum argument scheme but also a complete list of critical questions (CQs). In combining argument scheme and speech act theoretic elements, we formulate the felicity conditions of t…Read more
-
26Identifying Linked and Convergent Argument StructuresInformal Logic 42 (4): 363-387. 2022.To analyze the argument structure, the linked vs convergent distinction is crucial. In applying this distinction, argumentation scholars test for variations of argument strength under premise revision. A relevance-based test assesses whether an argument’s premises are individually relevant to its conclusion, while a support-based test assesses whether premises support the conclusion independently. Both criteria presuppose that evaluating an argument’s strength is methodologically prior to identi…Read more
-
29Authority Argument Schemes, Types, and Critical QuestionsArgumentation 37 (1): 25-51. 2023.Authority arguments generate support for claims by appealing to an agent’s authority status, rather than to reasons independent of it. With few exceptions, the current literature on argument schemes acknowledges two basic authority types. The _epistemic_ type grounds in knowledge, the_ deontic_ type grounds in power. We review how historically earlier scholarship acknowledged an_ attractiveness-based_ and a _majority-based_ authority type as equally basic type. Crossing these with basic speech a…Read more
-
42Newcomb’s problem isn’t a choice dilemmaSynthese 199 (1-2): 5125-5143. 2021.Newcomb’s problem involves a decision-maker faced with a choice and a predictor forecasting this choice. The agents’ interaction seems to generate a choice dilemma once the decision-maker seeks to apply two basic principles of rational choice theory : maximize expected utility ; adopt the dominant strategy. We review unsuccessful attempts at pacifying the dilemma by excluding Newcomb’s problem as an RCT-application, by restricting MEU and ADS, and by allowing for backward causation. A probabilit…Read more
-
31Slippery Slope Arguments in Legal Contexts: Towards Argumentative PatternsArgumentation 35 (4): 581-601. 2021.Addressing the slippery slope argument (SSA) in legal contexts from the perspective of pragma-dialectics, this paper elaborates the conditions under which an SSA-scheme instance is used reasonably (rather than fallaciously). We review SSA-instances in past legal decisions and analyze the basic legal SSA-scheme. By illustrating the institutional preconditions influencing the reasoning by which an SSA moves forward, we identify three sub-schemes (causal SSA, analogical SSA, and Sorites SSA). For e…Read more
-
17Essay Review: The Laws of BeliefWolfgang Spohn, The Laws of Belief: Ranking Theory and Its Philosophical Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press , 625 pp., £75.00 (review)Philosophy of Science 79 (4): 584-588. 2012.
-
45Perspectives on Structuralism, Munich, Germany, 16–18 February 2012Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 44 (1): 227-234. 2013.
-
68Editors’ introduction: social dynamics and collective rationalitySynthese 191 (11): 2353-2358. 2014.We provide a brief introduction to this special issue on social dynamics and collective rationality, and summarize the gist of the papers collected therein
-
119Denying antecedents and affirming consequents: The state of the artInformal Logic 35 (1): 88-134. 2015.Recent work on conditional reasoning argues that denying the antecedent [DA] and affirming the consequent [AC] are defeasible but cogent patterns of argument, either because they are effective, rational, albeit heuristic applications of Bayesian probability, or because they are licensed by the principle of total evidence. Against this, we show that on any prevailing interpretation of indicative conditionals the premises of DA and AC arguments do not license their conclusions without additional a…Read more
-
118Basic Concepts of StructuralismErkenntnis 79 (S8): 1367-1372. 2014.Primarily addressed to readers unfamiliar with the structuralist approach in philosophy of science, we introduce the basic concepts that the contributions to this special issue presuppose. By means of examples, we briefly review set-theoretic structures and predicates, the potential and actual models of an empirical theory, intended applications, as well as links and specializations that are applied, among others, in reconstructing the empirical claim associated with a theory element
-
1023A probabilistic analysis of argument cogencySynthese 195 (4): 1715-1740. 2018.This paper offers a probabilistic treatment of the conditions for argument cogency as endorsed in informal logic: acceptability, relevance, and sufficiency. Treating a natural language argument as a reason-claim-complex, our analysis identifies content features of defeasible argument on which the RSA conditions depend, namely: change in the commitment to the reason, the reason’s sensitivity and selectivity to the claim, one’s prior commitment to the claim, and the contextually determined thresho…Read more
-
16From Features via Frames to Spaces: Modeling Scientific Conceptual Change Without Incommensurability or AprioricityIn Thomas Gamerschlag, Doris Gerland, Rainer Osswald & Wiebke Petersen (eds.), Frames and Concept Types: Applications in Language and Philosophy, . pp. 69-89. 2014.The frame model, originating in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, has recently been applied to change-phenomena traditionally studied within history and philosophy of science. Its application purpose is to account for episodes of conceptual dynamics in the empirical sciences suggestive of incommensurability as evidenced by “ruptures” in the symbolic forms of historically successive empirical theories with similar classes of applications. This article reviews the frame model and t…Read more
-
67Schemes, Critical Questions, and Complete Argument EvaluationArgumentation 34 (4): 469-498. 2020.According to the argument scheme approach, to evaluate a given scheme-saturating instance completely does entail asking all critical questions relevant to it. Although this is a central task for argumentation theorists, the field currently lacks a method for providing a complete argument evaluation. Approaching this task at the meta-level, we combine a logical with a substantive approach to the argument schemes by starting from Toulmin’s schema: ‘data, warrant, so claim’. For the yet more genera…Read more
-
9The polysemy of ‘fallacy’—or ‘bias’, for that matterIn Patrick Bondy & Laura Benaquista (eds.), Argumentation, Objectivity and Bias, . pp. 2371-8323. 2016.Starting with a brief overview of current usages, this paper offers some constituents of a use-based analysis of ‘fallacy’, listing 16 conditions that have, for the most part implicitly, been discussed in the literature. Our thesis is that at least three related conceptions of ‘fallacy’ can be identified. The 16 conditions thus serve to “carve out” a semantic core and to distinguish three core-specifications. As our discussion suggests, these specifications can be related to three normative posi…Read more
-
10Giving Reasons Pro et Contra as a Debiasing Technique in Legal Decision MakingStudies in Logic 62 809-823. 2016.
-
4Similarity as distance : Three models for scientific conceptual knowledgeIn Piotr Łukowski, Aleksander Gemel & Bartosz Żukowski (eds.), Cognition, Meaning and Action: Lodz-Lund Studies in Cognitive Science, Lodz University Press & Jagiellonian University Press. pp. 63-86. 2015.
-
9Reconstructing Recent Work on Macrosocial Stress as a Research ProgramBasic and Applied Social Psychology 38 (6): 301-307. 2016.We reconstruct recent work on macrosocial stress as if it were an instance of a research strategy that tests point-alternative hypotheses within a full-fledged research program. Because this strategy is free of various deficits that beset dominant strategies, our article demonstrates one way in which the confidence crisis may be overcome.
-
4In Support of the Weak Rhetoric as Epistemic Thesis. On the Generality and Reliability of Persuasion KnowledgeIn H. Belle van, P. Gillaerts, B. van Gorp, D. van de Mieroop & K. Rutten (eds.), Verbal and Visual Rhetoric in a Media World, . pp. 61-76. 2013.
-
6Theory Change and Dimensional ChangeIn R. Churnside (ed.), Emerging Colors in Science—Transdisciplinary Essays., . pp. 145-147. 2012.
-
9From Features via Frames to Spaces: Modeling Scientific Conceptual Change Without Incommensurability or AprioricityIn T. Gamerschlag, R. Gerland, R. Osswald & W. Petersen (eds.), Frames and Concept Types: Applications in Language and Philosophy, . pp. 69-89. 2014.The frame model, originating in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, has recently been applied to change-phenomena traditionally studied within history and philosophy of science. Its application purpose is to account for episodes of conceptual dynamics in the empirical sciences suggestive of incommensurability as evidenced by “ruptures” in the symbolic forms of historically successive empirical theories with similar classes of applications. This article reviews the frame model and t…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Probability |