Results for 'interpretive arguments'

951 found
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  1. Statutory Interpretation: Pragmatics and Argumentation.Douglas Walton, Fabrizio Macagno & Giovanni Sartor - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Statutory interpretation involves the reconstruction of the meaning of a legal statement when it cannot be considered as accepted or granted. This phenomenon needs to be considered not only from the legal and linguistic perspective, but also from the argumentative one - which focuses on the strategies for defending a controversial or doubtful viewpoint. This book draws upon linguistics, legal theory, computing, and dialectics to present an argumentation-based approach to statutory interpretation. By translating and summarizing the existing legal interpretative canons (...)
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  2. Statutory Interpretation as Argumentation.Douglas Walton, Giovanni Sartor & Fabrizio Macagno - 2011 - In Colin Aitken, Amalia Amaya, Kevin D. Ashley, Carla Bagnoli, Giorgio Bongiovanni, Bartosz Brożek, Cristiano Castelfranchi, Samuele Chilovi, Marcello Di Bello, Jaap Hage, Kenneth Einar Himma, Lewis A. Kornhauser, Emiliano Lorini, Fabrizio Macagno, Andrei Marmor, J. J. Moreso, Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Antonino Rotolo, Giovanni Sartor, Burkhard Schafer, Chiara Valentini, Bart Verheij, Douglas Walton & Wojciech Załuski (eds.), Handbook of Legal Reasoning and Argumentation. Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer Verlag. pp. 519-560.
    This chapter proposes a dialectical approach to legal interpretation, consisting of three dimensions: a formalization of the canons of interpretation in terms of argumentation schemes; a dialectical classification of interpretive schemes; and a logical and computational model for comparing the arguments pro and contra an interpretation. The traditional interpretive maxims or canons used in both common and civil law are translated into defeasible patterns of arguments, which can be evaluated through sets of corresponding critical questions. These (...)
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  3. (1 other version)An argumentation framework for contested cases of statutory interpretation.Fabrizio Macagno, Giovanni Sartor & Douglas Walton - 2016 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 24 (1):51-91.
    This paper proposes an argumentation-based procedure for legal interpretation, by reinterpreting the traditional canons of textual interpretation in terms of argumentation schemes, which are then classified, formalized, and represented through argument visualization and evaluation tools. The problem of statutory interpretation is framed as one of weighing contested interpretations as pro and con arguments. The paper builds an interpretation procedure by formulating a set of argumentation schemes that can be used to comparatively evaluate the types of arguments used in (...)
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  4. Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation.Fabrizio Macagno & Douglas Walton - 2017 - Amsterdam: Springer.
    This book shows how research in linguistic pragmatics, philosophy of language, and rhetoric can be connected through argumentation to analyze a recognizably common strategy used in political and everyday conversation, namely the distortion of another’s words in an argumentative exchange. Straw man argumentation refers to the modification of a position by misquoting, misreporting or wrenching the original speaker’s statements from their context in order to attack them more easily or more effectively. Through 63 examples taken from different contexts (including political (...)
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  5. Arguments of statutory interpretation and argumentation schemes.Fabrizio Macagno & Douglas Walton - 2017 - International Journal of Legal Discourse 1 (21):47–83.
    In this paper it is shown how certain defeasible argumentation schemes can be used to represent the logical structure of the most common types of argument used for statutory interpretation both in civil and common law. The method is based on an argumentation structure in which the conclusion, namely, the meaning attributed to a legal source, is modeled as a claim that needs that is be supported by pro and con defeasible arguments. The defeasible nature of each scheme is (...)
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  6. An interpretation of political argument.William Bosworth - 2020 - European Journal of Political Theory 19 (3):293-313.
    How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim ‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard (...)
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  7. Interpretative Disputes, Explicatures, and Argumentative Reasoning.Fabrizio Macagno & Alessandro Capone - 2016 - Argumentation 30 (4):399-422.
    The problem of establishing the best interpretation of a speech act is of fundamental importance in argumentation and communication in general. A party in a dialogue can interpret another’s or his own speech acts in the most convenient ways to achieve his dialogical goals. In defamation law this phenomenon becomes particularly important, as the dialogical effects of a communicative move may result in legal consequences. The purpose of this paper is to combine the instruments provided by argumentation theory with the (...)
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  8. The standard interpretation of Schopenhauer's compensation argument for pessimism: A nonstandard variant.David Bather Woods - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):961-976.
    According to Schopenhauer’s compensation argument for pessimism, the non-existence of the world is preferable to its existence because no goods can ever compensate for the mere existence of evil. Standard interpretations take this argument to be based on Schopenhauer’s thesis that all goods are merely the negation of evils, from which they assume it follows that the apparent goods in life are in fact empty and without value. This article develops a non-standard variant of the standard interpretation, which accepts the (...)
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  9. Interpreting the probabilities in Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism.Gary Neels - forthcoming - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion:1-13.
    In this paper, I examine Plantinga’s (1993, 2000, 2011) Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). While there has been much discussion about Plantinga’s use of probabilities in the argument, I contend that insufficient attention has been paid to the question of how we are to interpret those probabilities. In this paper, I argue that views Plantinga defends elsewhere limit the range of interpretations available to him here. The upshot is that the EAAN is more limited in its applicability than Plantinga alleges.
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  10. Elements for an Argumentative Method of Interpretation.María G. Navarro - 2010 - Rozenberg Quarterly. The Magazine 1 (1).
    When are we, in fact, arguing? Even one and the same author may offer more than one definition of what he understands by argumentation: this is partly because the problem of argumentation is not confined to a single area of knowledge or of practical life. Definitions of argumentation are as varied as the different positions taken on the question of what exactly we do when we argue. Be that as it may, we are struck by the fact that the problem (...)
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  11. The Enhanced Indispensability Argument, the circularity problem, and the interpretability strategy.Jan Heylen & Lars Arthur Tump - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):3033-3045.
    Within the context of the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, one discussion about the status of mathematics is concerned with the ‘Enhanced Indispensability Argument’, which makes explicit in what way mathematics is supposed to be indispensable in science, namely explanatory. If there are genuine mathematical explanations of empirical phenomena, an argument for mathematical platonism could be extracted by using inference to the best explanation. The best explanation of the primeness of the life cycles of Periodical Cicadas is genuinely mathematical, according to Baker (...)
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  12. The interpretation of indefinites in future tense sentences. A novel argument for the modality of will?Fabio Del Prete - 2014 - In Mikhail Kissine, Philippe de Brabanter & Saghie Sharifzadeh (eds.), Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought.
    The chapter considers two semantic issues concerning will-sentences: Stalnaker’s Asymmetry and modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. The former points to a distinction between will and modal verbs, seeming to show that will does not license non-specific indefinites. The latter, conversely, suggests that will-sentences involve some kind of modality. To account for the data, the chapter proposes that will is semantically a tense, hence it doesn’t contribute a quantifier over modal alternatives; a modal feature, however, is introduced in the interpretation of (...)
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  13. (1 other version) Probabilistic interpretations of argumentative attacks: logical and experimental foundations.Niki Pfeifer & C. G. Fermüller - 2018 - In V. Kratochvíl & J. Vejnarová (eds.), 11th Workshop on Uncertainty Processing (WUPES'18). pp. 141-152.
    We present an interdisciplinary approach to study systematic relations between logical form and attacks between claims in an argumentative framework. We propose to generalize qualitative attack principles by quantitative ones. Specifically, we use coherent conditional probabilities to evaluate the rationality of principles which govern the strength of argumentative attacks. Finally, we present an experiment which explores the psychological plausibility of selected attack principles.
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  14. A New Argument for the Nomological Interpretation of the Wave Function: The Galilean Group and the Classical Limit of Nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics.Valia Allori - 2017 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science (2):177-188.
    In this paper I investigate, within the framework of realistic interpretations of the wave function in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, the mathematical and physical nature of the wave function. I argue against the view that mathematically the wave function is a two-component scalar field on configuration space. First, I review how this view makes quantum mechanics non- Galilei invariant and yields the wrong classical limit. Moreover, I argue that interpreting the wave function as a ray, in agreement many physicists, Galilei invariance (...)
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  15. Arguments from Expert Opinion – An Epistemological Approach.Christoph Lumer - 2020 - In Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Henrike Jansen, Jan Albert Van Laar & Bart Verheij (eds.), Reason to Dissent. Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Argumentation. College Publications. pp. 403-422.
    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 (...)
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  16. Understanding Students’ Reasoning: Argumentation Schemes as an Interpretation Method in Science Education.Aikaterini Konstantinidou & Fabrizio Macagno - 2013 - Science & Education 22 (5):1069-1087.
    The relationship between teaching and argumentation is becoming a crucial issue in the field of education and, in particular, science education. Teaching has been analyzed as a dialogue aimed at persuading the interlocutors, introducing a conceptual change that needs to be grounded on the audience’s background knowledge. This paper addresses this issue from a perspective of argumentation studies. Our claim is that argumentation schemes, namely abstract patterns of argument, can be an instrument for reconstructing the tacit premises in students’ argumentative (...)
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  17. Hegel in the Americas: Interpretive Assimilation and the Anticolonial Argument.Kevin Harrelson - 2019 - Revista Electronica Estudos Hegelianos 16 (27):70-99.
    This essay criticizes some strategies of Hegel scholarship, especially the non-metaphysical school and its recent metaphysical successor. My main claim is that these approaches are rhetorically opaque, and thus vulnerable to a certain anticolonial argument. In place of these strategies, I recommend and illustrate a more historically perspicuous approach that is sensitive to concerns about the role of European philosophy in the Americas.
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  18. Recognizing Argument Types and Adding Missing Reasons.Christoph Lumer - 2019 - In Bart J. Garssen, David Godden, Gordon Mitchell & Jean Wagemans (eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA). [Amsterdam, July 3-6, 2018.]. Sic Sat. pp. 769-777.
    The article develops and justifies, on the basis of the epistemological argumentation theory, two central pieces of the theory of evaluative argumentation interpretation: 1. criteria for recognizing argument types and 2. rules for adding reasons to create ideal arguments. Ad 1: The criteria for identifying argument types are a selection of essential elements from the definitions of the respective argument types. Ad 2: After presenting the general principles for adding reasons (benevolence, authenticity, immanence, optimization), heuristics are proposed for finding (...)
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  19. The Knowledge Argument and Two Interpretations of 'Knowing What it's Like'.Daniel Stoljar - 2017 - In Dale Jacquette (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
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  20. Hegel’s modal argument against Spinozism. An interpretation of the chapter ‘Actuality’ in the Science of Logic.Franz Knappik - 2015 - Hegel Bulletin 36 (1):53-79.
    I propose a new reading of Hegel’s discussion of modality in the ‘Actuality’ chapter of the Science of Logic. On this reading, the main purpose of the chapter is a critical engagement with Spinoza’s modal metaphysics. Hegel first reconstructs a rationalist line of thought — corresponding to the cosmological argument for the existence of God — that ultimately leads to Spinozist necessitarianism. He then presents a reductio argument against necessitarianism, contending that as a consequence of necessitarianism, no adequate explanatory accounts (...)
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  21. (2 other versions)A classification system for argumentation schemes.Douglas Walton & Fabrizio Macagno - 2015 - Argument and Computation 6 (3):219-245.
    This paper explains the importance of classifying argumentation schemes, and outlines how schemes are being used in current research in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics on argument mining. It provides a survey of the literature on scheme classification. What are so far generally taken to represent a set of the most widely useful defeasible argumentation schemes are surveyed and explained systematically, including some that are difficult to classify. A new classification system covering these centrally important schemes is built.
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  22. The Concept of Ergon: Towards An Achievement Interpretation of Aristotle's 'Function Argument'.Samuel H. Baker - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 48:227-266.
    In Nicomachean Ethics 1. 7, Aristotle gives a definition of the human good, and he does so by means of the “ ergon argument.” I clear the way for a new interpretation of this argument by arguing that Aristotle does not think that the ergon of something is always the proper activity of that thing. Though he has a single concept of an ergon, Aristotle identifies the ergon of an X as an activity in some cases but a product in (...)
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  23. An exceptionally simple argument against the many-worlds interpretation.Shan Gao - 2011
    It is shown that the superposed wave function of a measuring device, in each branch of which there is a definite measurement result, does not correspond to many mutually unobservable but equally real worlds, as the superposed wave function can be observed in our world by protective measurement.
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  24. Three Arguments for Humility.David Yates - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):461-481.
    Ramseyan humility is the thesis that we cannot know which properties realize the roles specified by the laws of completed physics. Lewis seems to offer a sceptical argument for this conclusion. Humean fundamental properties can be permuted as to their causal roles and distribution throughout spacetime, yielding alternative possible worlds with the same fundamental structure as actuality, but at which the totality of available evidence is the same. On the assumption that empirical knowledge requires evidence, we cannot know which of (...)
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  25. Probabilistic Arguments in the Epistemological Approach to Argumentation.Christoph Lumer - 2011 - In Frans H. van Eemeren, Bart Garssen, David Godden & Gordon Mitchell (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation. Rozenberg / Sic Sat. pp. 1141-1154.
    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. (...)
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  26. Intérprete Omnisciente, Caridad Y Externalismo.Pablo Melogno - 2011 - Episteme NS: Revista Del Instituto de Filosofía de la Universidad Central de Venezuela 31 (1):55-67.
    Se discute el argumento del intérprete omnisciente formulado por DonaldDavidson, en relación con otros dos aspectos de la filosofía davidsoniana:el principio de caridad y la concepción externalista del significado. Se busca mostrar que el argumento ha funcionado antes como una consecuenciade la caracterización davidsoniana de la interpretación radical que como unelemento de fortalecimiento de la misma, o bien presupone la metodologíadavidsoniana de interpretación basada en el principio de caridad, cuyos problemas trataba de solucionar, o bien presupone la concepción externalista delsignificado, (...)
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  27. A Critical Discussion of the “Memory-Challenge” to Interpretations of the Private Language Argument.Zhao Fan - 2021 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 9 (4):48-58.
    In a recent paper, Francis Y. Lin proposes a “memory-challenge” to two main interpretations of Wittgenstein’s private language argument: the “no-criterion-of-correctness” interpretation and the “no-stage-setting” interpretation. According to Lin, both camps of interpretation fail to explain why a private language is impossible within a short time period. To answer the “memory-challenge”, Lin motivates a grammatical interpretation of the private language argument. In this paper, I provide a critical discussion of Lin’s objection to these interpretations and argue that Lin’s objection fails. (...)
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  28. On the Argument from Physics and General Relativity.Christopher Gregory Weaver - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (2):333-373.
    I argue that the best interpretation of the general theory of relativity has need of a causal entity, and causal structure that is not reducible to light cone structure. I suggest that this causal interpretation of GTR helps defeat a key premise in one of the most popular arguments for causal reductionism, viz., the argument from physics.
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  29. What the Tortoise will say to Achilles – or “taking the traditional interpretation of the sea battle argument seriously”.Ramiro Peres - 2017 - Filosofia Unisinos 18 (1).
    This dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise – in the spirit of those of Carroll and Hofstadter – argues against the idea, identified with the “traditional” interpretation of Aristotle’s “sea battle argument”, that future contingents are an exception to the Principle of Bivalence. It presents examples of correct everyday predictions, without which one would not be able to decide and to act; however, doing this is incompatible with the belief that the content of these predictions lacks a truth-value. The cost (...)
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  30. Charitable Interpretations and the Political Domestication of Spinoza, or, Benedict in the Land of the Secular Imagination.Yitzhak Y. Melamed - 2013 - In Justin Smith, Eric Schliesser & Mogens Laerke (eds.), The Methodology of the History of Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
    In a beautiful recent essay, the philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong explains the reasons for his departure from evangelical Christianity, the religious culture in which he was brought up. Sinnot-Armstrong contrasts the interpretive methods used by good philosophers and fundamentalist believers: Good philosophers face objections and uncertainties. They follow where arguments lead, even when their conclusions are surprising and disturbing. Intellectual honesty is also required of scholars who interpret philosophical texts. If I had distorted Kant’s view to make him reach (...)
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  31. Competing interpretations of the inner chapters of the "zhuangzi".W. Van Norden Bryan - 1996 - Philosophy East and West 46 (2):247-268.
    In the Inner Chapters, arguments for a variety of different philosophical positions are present, including skepticism, relativism, particularism, and objectivism. Given that these are not all mutually consistent, we are left with the problem of reconciling the tensions among them. The various positions are described and passages from the Inner Chapters are presented illustrating each. A detailed commentary is offered on the opening of the Inner Chapters, arguing that it is best understood in an objectivist fashion. An interpretation is (...)
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  32. Radical interpretation and decision theory.Anandi Hattiangadi & H. Orri Stefánsson - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6473-6494.
    This paper takes issue with an influential interpretationist argument for physicalism about intentionality based on the possibility of radical interpretation. The interpretationist defends the physicalist thesis that the intentional truths supervene on the physical truths by arguing that it is possible for a radical interpreter, who knows all of the physical truths, to work out the intentional truths about what an arbitrary agent believes, desires, and means without recourse to any further empirical information. One of the most compelling arguments (...)
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  33. (1 other version)Kant's Quasi‐Transcendental Argument for a Necessary and Universal Evil Propensity in Human Nature.Stephen R. Palmquist - 2008 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (2):261-297.
    In Part One of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Kant repeatedly refers to a “proof” that human nature has a necessary and universal “evil propensity,” but he provides only obscure hints at its location. Interpreters have failed to identify such an argument in Part One. After examining relevant passages, summarizing recent attempts to reconstruct the argument, and explaining why these do not meet Kant's stated needs, I argue that the elusive proof must have a transcendental form (called quasi‐transcendental (...)
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  34. A Counterexample to Huemer's ’No Matter What’ Interpretation of the Consequence Argument. Mansooreh - manuscript
    The consequence argument is a salient argument in favor of incompatibilism which is the thesis that if determinism is true, then it is not the case that we have free will. In a nutshell, the consequence argument has it that if determinism is true, then our acts are determined by the laws of nature and events of the past. But we are neither able to change the past nor the laws of nature. Therefore, we are not able to change the (...)
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  35. Interpretative expressivism: A theory of normative belief.James L. D. Brown - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (1):1-20.
    Metaethical expressivism is typically characterised as the view that normative statements express desire-like attitudes instead of beliefs. However, in this paper I argue that expressivists should claim that normative statements express beliefs in normative propositions, and not merely in some deflationary sense but in a theoretically robust sense explicated by a theory of propositional attitudes. I first argue that this can be achieved by combining an interpretationist understanding of belief with a nonfactualist view of normative belief content. This results in (...)
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  36. (1 other version)To Save the Semantic View: An Argument for Returning to Suppes' Interpretation.Thomas Cunningham - 2008
    Recent work on the semantic view of scientific theories is highly critical of the position. This paper identifies two common criticisms of the view, describes two popular alternatives for responding to them, and argues those responses do not suffice. Subsequently, it argues that retuning to Patrick Suppes’ interpretation of the position provides the conceptual resources for rehabilitating the semantic view.
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  37. Natural Argument by a Quantum Computer.Vasil Penchev - 2020 - Computing Methodology eJournal (Elsevier: SSRN) 3 (30):1-8.
    Natural argument is represented as the limit, to which an infinite Turing process converges. A Turing machine, in which the bits are substituted with qubits, is introduced. That quantum Turing machine can recognize two complementary natural arguments in any data. That ability of natural argument is interpreted as an intellect featuring any quantum computer. The property is valid only within a quantum computer: To utilize it, the observer should be sited inside it. Being outside it, the observer would obtain (...)
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  38. Skeptical hypotheses and 'omniscient' interpreters.Steven L. Reynolds - 1993 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (2):184 – 195.
    An attempt to defend Davidson's omniscient interpreter argument against various attempts to show that it does not succeed in showing that most of our beliefs must be true. It doesn't argue that this is a good answer to skepticism.
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  39. Individualism and interpretation.Henry Jackman - 1998 - Southwest Philosophy Review 14 (1):31-38.
    'Interpretational' accounts of meaning are frequently treated as incompatible with accounts stressing language's 'social' character. However, this paper argues that one can reconcile interpretational and social accounts by distinguishing "methodological" from "ascriptional" individualism. While methodological individualism requires only that the meaning of one's terms ultimately be grounded in facts about oneself, ascriptional individualism requires that the meaning of one's terms be independent of how others use theirs. Interpretational accounts are committed only to methodological individualism, while arguments for languages social (...)
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  40. Murdoch's Ontological Argument.Cathy Mason & Matt Dougherty - 2023 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (3):769-784.
    Anselm’s ontological argument is an argument for the existence of God. This paper presents Iris Murdoch’s ontological argument for the existence of the Good. It discusses her interpretation of Anselm’s argument, her distinctive appropriation of it, as well as some of the merits of her version of the argument. In doing so, it also shows how the argument integrates some key Murdochian ideas: morality’s wide scope, the basicness of vision to morality, moral realism, and Platonism.
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  41. Aborting the zygote argument.Stephen Kearns - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (3):379-389.
    Alfred Mele’s zygote argument for incompatibilism is based on a case involving an agent in a deterministic world whose entire life is planned by someone else. Mele’s contention is that Ernie (the agent) is unfree and that normal determined agents are relevantly similar to him with regards to free will. In this paper, I examine four different ways of understanding this argument and then criticize each interpretation. I then extend my criticism to manipulation arguments in general. I conclude that (...)
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  42. Radical interpretation, scepticism, and the possibility of shared error.Joshua Rowan Thorpe - 2019 - Synthese 196 (8):3355-3368.
    Davidson argues that his version of interpretivism entails that sceptical scenarios are impossible, thus offering a response to any sceptical argument that depends upon the possibility of sceptical scenarios. It has been objected that Davidson’s interpretivism does not entail the impossibility of sceptical scenarios due to the possibility that interpreter and speaker are in a shared state of massive error, and so this response to scepticism fails. In this paper I show that the objection from the possibility of shared error (...)
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  43. Schelling's Moral Argument for a Metaphysics of Contingency.Alistair Welchman - 2014 - In Emilio Corriero & Andrea Dezi (eds.), Nature and Realism in Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature. pp. 27-54.
    Schelling’s middle period works have always been a source of fascination: they mark a break with the idealism (in both senses of the word) of his early works and the Fichtean and then Hegelian tradition; while they are not weighed down by the reactionary burden of his late lectures on theology and mythology. But they have been equally a source of perplexity. The central work of this period, the Essay on Human Freedom (1809) takes as its topic the moral problem (...)
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  44. Nāgārjuna’s Arguments on Motion Revisited.Jan Westerhoff - 2008 - Journal of Indian Philosophy 36 (4):455-479.
    This paper discusses a somewhat neglected reading of the second chapter of Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, arguing that the main focus of a crucial part is a particular theory of properties and their relation to individuals they instantiate, rather than the refutation of specific assumptions about the nature of space and time. Some of Nāgārjuna’s key arguments about motion should be understood as argument templates in which notions other than mover, motion, and so forth could be substituted. The remainder of the (...)
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  45. Reporting and Interpreting Intentions in Defamation Law.Fabrizio Macagno - 2015 - In Alessandro Capone, Ferenc Kiefer & Franco Lo Piparo (eds.), Indirect Reports and Pragmatics. Cham: Imprint: Springer. pp. 593-619.
    The interpretation and the indirect reporting of a speaker’s communicative intentions lie at the crossroad between pragmatics, argumentation theory, and forensic linguistics. Since the leading case Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., in the United States the legal problem of determining the truth of a quotation is essentially equated with the correctness of its indirect reporting, i.e. the representation of the speaker’s intentions. For this reason, indirect reports are treated as interpretations of what the speaker intends to communicate. Theoretical considerations, (...)
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  46. Interpretive Charity and Content Externalism.Daniel Dohrn - manuscript
    Interpretive charity is an important principle in devising the content of propositional attitudes and their expression. I want to argue that it does not square well with externalism about content. Although my argument clearly also applies to a principle of maximizing truth (as it requires only the true belief - component of knowledge), I will focus my attention to Timothy Williamson’s more intriguing recent proposal of maximizing knowledge.
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  47. Defaults and inferences in interpretation.Fabrizio Macagno - 2017 - Journal of Pragmatics 117:280-290.
    The notions of inference and default are used in pragmatics with different meanings, resulting in theoretical disputes that emphasize the differences between the various pragmatic approaches. This paper is aimed at showing how the terminological and theoretical differences concerning the two aforementioned terms result from taking into account inference and default from different points of view and levels of analysis. Such differences risk making a dialogue between the theories extremely difficult. However, at a functional level of analysis the different theories, (...)
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  48. Three Arguments for Absolute Outcome Measures.Jan Sprenger & Jacob Stegenga - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (5):840-852.
    Data from medical research are typically summarized with various types of outcome measures. We present three arguments in favor of absolute over relative outcome measures. The first argument is from cognitive bias: relative measures promote the reference class fallacy and the overestimation of treatment effectiveness. The second argument is decision-theoretic: absolute measures are superior to relative measures for making a decision between interventions. The third argument is causal: interpreted as measures of causal strength, absolute measures satisfy a set of (...)
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  49. Interpretations of probability in evolutionary theory.Roberta L. Millstein - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (5):1317-1328.
    Evolutionary theory (ET) is teeming with probabilities. Probabilities exist at all levels: the level of mutation, the level of microevolution, and the level of macroevolution. This uncontroversial claim raises a number of contentious issues. For example, is the evolutionary process (as opposed to the theory) indeterministic, or is it deterministic? Philosophers of biology have taken different sides on this issue. Millstein (1997) has argued that we are not currently able answer this question, and that even scientific realists ought to remain (...)
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  50. The Ontological Argument and Objects of Thought.Edward Wierenga - 2011 - Philosophic Exchange 42 (1):82-103.
    Is there anything new to be said about Anselm's ontological argument? Recent work by Lynne Baker and Gareth Matthews raises some interesting and important questions about the argument. First, Anselm's argument is set in the context of a prayer to God, whose existence Anselm seeks to prove. Is that peculiar or paradoxical? Does it imply that Anselm's prayer is insincere? Baker and Matthews have offered a novel interpretation of Anselm's argument, designed to solve a crucial problem with it. Does their (...)
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