What role, if any, does dialectic play in Aristotle’s epistemology in the Topics? In this paper I argue that it does play a role, but a role that is independent of endoxa. In the first section, I sketch the case for thinking that dialectic plays a distinctively epistemological role—not just a methodological role, or a merely instrumental role in getting episteme. In the second section, I consider three ways it could play that role, on two of which endoxa play at (...) least a co-starring role. But in the third section, I argue that endoxa don’t play that co-starring role, by arguing for a deflationary account of what endoxa are. For that reason, the third view emerges as the most plausible; but the third view is, I’ll suggest, Platonic. (shrink)

The paper discusses the place and the status of fallacies in Arnauld and Nicole’s Port-Royal Logic, which seems to be the first book to introduce a radical change from the traditional Aristotelian account of fallacies. The most striking innovation is not in the definition of a fallacy but in the publication of a new list of fallacies, dropping some Aristotelian ones and adding more than ten new ones. The first part of the paper deals with the context of the book’s (...) publication. We then show the influence of Cartesian and Augustinian/Pascalian philosophy on the whole book, especially their common critical views about logic, dialectic and their traditional academic teaching. The third part of the paper discusses the two chapters on fallacies. It focuses on their place in the book and their relation with its general orientation, before turning to their content, closely connected with some major concerns of the time. (shrink)

We all seem to have a sense of what good and bad arguments are, and there is a long history—focusing on fallacies—of trying to provide objective standards that would allow a clear separation of good and bad arguments. This contribution discusses the limits of attempts to determine the quality of arguments. It begins with defining bad arguments as those that deviate from an established standard of good arguments. Since there are different conceptualizations of “argument”—as controversy, as debate, and as justification—and (...) since arguments in each of these senses can be used for different purposes, a first problem is that we would need a large variety of standards for “good” arguments. After this, the contribution focuses in particular on proposals made in the literature on how to assess the quality of arguments in the sense of justification. It distinguishes three problems of assessment: How to determine whether reasons are acceptable, whether reasons are sufficient to justify the conclusion, and how to identify arguments in real-world speech acts and texts? It is argued that limitations of argument assessment result from unavoidable relativism: The assessment of many—if not most—arguments depends on the epistemic situation of the evaluator. (shrink)

In typical critical thinking texts, hyperbole is presented as being largely “argumentationally innocent” - it’s primary role being to express emotion of to bring desired emphases to a particular point. This discounts its prevalent use in argumentation, as it is also used as a device to persuade, and in particular, to persuade an interlocutor that they should take or support a course of action. When it is so used, the exaggerated claims would, if true, provide greater support for the conclusion. (...) But since the claims are not fully accurate, this “greater support” is only illusory. Its use is thus deceptive and counts as fallacious reasoning. (shrink)

Since a clear account of the fallacy of false disjunctive syllogism is missing in the literature, the fallacy is defined and its three types are differentiated after some preliminaries. Section 4 further elaborates the differentia specifica for each of the three types by analyzing relevant argument criticism of each, as well as the related profiles of dialogue. After defining false disjunctive syllogisms, it becomes possible to distinguish between a false dilemma and a false disjunctive syllogism: section 5 analyzes their similarities (...) and section 6 explains their differences. (shrink)

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

The history of fallacy theory is long, distinguished and, admittedly, checkered. I offer a bird eye view on it, with the aim of contrasting the standard conception of fallacies as attractive and universal errors that are hard to eradicate with the contemporary preoccupation with “non-fallacious fallacies”, that is, arguments that fit the bill of one of the traditional fallacies but are actually respectable enough to be used in appropriate contexts. Godden and Zenker have recently argued that reinterpreting alleged fallacies as (...) non-fallacious arguments requires supplementing the textual material with something else, e.g. probability distributions, pragmatic considerations, dialogical context. Thus fallacies remain gappy on all accounts, and this is the hallmark of their failure. However, I argue that such gappiness is typically unproblematic, and thus no more flawed than enthymematic argumentation in general. This, in turn, calls into question the usefulness of the very notion of fallacy. (shrink)

I argue in a non-reductive sense for a plausible epistemic principle, which can (1) theoretically and instrumentally unify or systematize all fallacies, and (2) provide a justification for using such a principle for characterizing an erroneous argument as a fallacy. This plausible epistemic principle involves the idea of an error in the method of justification, which results in a failure to provide relevant evidence to satisfy certain standards of adequate proof. Thus, all fallacies are systematically disguised failures to provide substantive (...) proof: a failure in the attempt to persuade rationally, as opposed to emotionally or rhetorically. I argue that the epistemic idea of begging the question is essential to this idea of a fallacy as an inadequate proof. (shrink)

In this book some options concerning the greenhouse effect are assessed from a welfarist point of view: business as usual, stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions and reduction by 25% and by 60%. Up to today only economic analyses of such options are available, which monetize welfare losses. Because this is found to be wanting from a moral point of view, the present study welfarizes (among others) monetary losses on the basis of a hedonistic utilitarianism and other, justice incorporating, welfare ethics. (...) For these welfarist evaluations information about the social consequences of the four options are collected from the literature and eventually corrected; then the consequences for individual well-being are assessed based on psychological research about well-being dependent on the social situation of the individual; finally the aggregation formulas of the respective welfare ethics are applied to these data. Assessments by other types of ethics, e.g. Kantian ethic, are included. The strongest abatement option is found to be optimum with great unanimity. - In addition a cost-welfare analysis of greenhouse gas abatement is undertaken revealing efficient cost-welfare ratios for these measures and the most efficient ratio for the strongest option. - A final, more theoretical part discusses the moral obligations following from such evaluations. The notion of 'moral obligation' is explained in a way that, apart from moral goodness of the required act, reinforcement by formal or informal sanctions is another necessary condition for moral obligations. This leads to a conception of a historical morality according to which the demands of morality rise in the long run. Applying this conception to the greenhouse effect implies that presently we have the moral duty to raise the standards of greenhouse gas abatement as much as is politically feasible. (shrink)

In this paper, I study the relation between arguments against the person (aka ad hominem or personal attack arguments) and disqualifications for conflicts of interests. I show that both types of arguments share a similar logical structure and that they can be considered to be acceptable in similar circumstances.

A priori theories of justification of logic based on meaning often lead to trouble, in particular to issues concerning circularity. First, I present Boghossian’s a prioriview. Boghossian maintains the rule-circular justifications from a conceptual role semantics. However, rule-circular justifications are problematic. Recently, Boghossian (Boghossian, 2015) has claimed that rules should be thought of as contents and contents as abstract objects. In this paper, I discuss Boghossian’s view. My argumentation consists of three main parts. First, I analyse several arguments to show (...) that in fact, Boghossian’s inferentialist solution is not fully satisfying. Second, I discuss the matter further, if one accepts that basic logical rules are constitutive of meaning, that is, they constitute the logical concepts and the content of a rule is an abstract object, then abstract objects — like, for example, rules — could be constitutive of meaning. The question is whether conceptual priority is in the judgment or in the object and what theory of content is pursued. Grasping content as a matter of knowing how a word or concept behaves in inferences is not completely explicative. Finally, I contend that rules come to exist as a result of certain kinds of mental action. These actions function as constitutive norms. Logical rules are not abstract objects but ideal. What one construes as norms or rules of content may involve idealization, but this is because we share a language. (shrink)

The United Nation’s mandate to engineer international peacecraft is correlated with the promotion of universal human rights. Universal human rights are held to apply consistently to everyone everywhere without conceivable exception. There is some debate as to whether universal human rights possibly exist. This debate centers around two difficulties: 1) the task of identifying a single trait or capability that all human beings necessarily share, and 2) the task of relating human rights to this trait or capability. Conventional epistemic justifications (...) defending the existence of universal human rights attempt to address both difficulties. However, they have become the focus of numerous criticisms. By conducting systematizing and critically reviewing text analyses, I will conclude that conventional epistemic justifications are unable to refute standard criticisms satisfactorily. In their place, I will introduce an epistemic justification from the philosophy of mind. I will attempt to demonstrate that this justification is capable of 1) identifying a single trait that all human beings necessarily share, 2) relating human rights to this trait, and 3) satisfactorily refuting the standard criticisms raised against conventional epistemic theories. I have produced this paper in the hope of further legitimizing the UN’s mandate to engineer international peacecraft by providing a more philosophically optimal justification of claims affirming the existence of universal human rights. (shrink)

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 act types thus yields authority argument sub-schemes. Focusing on the_ epistemic-assertive_ sub-scheme (...) (‘an epistemic authority _A_ _E_ asserts a proposition _P_’), we apply a meta-level approach to specifying critical questions. Results improve the evaluation of this sub-scheme and show how similar improvements are obtainable for other schemes. (shrink)

Historically, the fallacies have been neglected as objects of systematic study. Yet, since Hamblin's famous criticism of the state of fallacy theory, a substantial literature has been produced. A large portion of this literature is the work of Douglas Walton and John Woods. This paper will deal directly with the criticism of that work which has been advanced by van Eemeren and Grootendorst, particularly the complaints found in their writings of 1992, concerning the disunification of the fallacies and the exemplaristic (...) approach of Woods and Walton's theories. It proposes a unification of the theories of Woods and Walton with that of van Eemeren and Grootendorst, and suggests that such a unification could be advantageous to both theories, and highly interesting for fallacy theory in general. (shrink)

The translation into French of the English word “fallacy” opens a discussion on the difference between fallacy and sophism in English. The two words are sometimes synonyms, but a difference is sometimes made on the ground that a sophism is deliberate and a fallacy is non-deliberate. In a second part of the paper this distinctive criterion is taken seriously to discuss the relative frequency of sophisms and of fallacies for a typical kind of fallacious argument. I claim that this aspect (...) should be taken into account by a theory of fallacious argument. (shrink)

I will situate the fallacies approach to reasoning with the aim of making it more relevant to contemporary life and thus intellectually significant and valuable as a method for teaching reasoning. This entails a revision that will relegate some of the traditional fallacies to the realm of history and introduce more recently recognized problems in reasoning. Some newly recognized problems that demand attention are revealed by contemporary science studies, which reveal at least two tenacious problems in reasoning that I will (...) explore in this paper. One of these problems is androcentrism, a ubiquitous problem with reasoning that feminists exposed in the twentieth century but that continues to pervade people’s reasoning. The other is biological reductionism in at least two specific forms: genetic determinism and adaptationism. (shrink)

This essay addresses the collapse/incoherence problem for normative frameworks that contain both fundamental values and rules for promoting those values. The problem is that in some cases, we would bring about more of the fundamental value by violating the framework’s rules than by following them. In such cases, if the framework requires us to follow the rules anyway, then it appears to be incoherent; but if it allows us to make exceptions to the rules, then the framework “collapses” into one (...) that doesn’t make use of rules in the first place. The chapter begins with an examination of happiness and truth as fundamental values in Mill’s work, which lead into parallel versions of the collapse/incoherence problem in ethics and epistemology. It then sets out the collapse problem for rule-consequentialist approaches in ethics, truth-directed accounts of justification in epistemology, and epistemological approaches to argument cogency. The chapter closes with discussion of two potential solutions to the problem. (shrink)

In IV, xvii, 19–22 of his Essay, Locke employs Latin labels for four kinds of argument, of which one (ad hominem) was already in circulation and one (ad judicium) has never had much currency. The present proposal seeks to locate and clarify what Locke was aiming to describe, and to contrast what he says with some subsequent uses that have been made of these labels as if they named fallacies. Though three of the four kinds of argument that Locke picks (...) out are often less than decisive, he casts no aspersion on the legitimacy of their use in debate. (shrink)