An Exploration of Johnson's Sense of ‘Argument’

This essay attempts to give definitions and identity conditions for the two predominant senses of Argument currently in use, the one involving reasons for a conclusion and the other denoting an expressed disagreement with ensuing verbal behaviour by two parties. I see Johnson's new concept of Argument, as developed in his book Manifest Rationality, as a hybrid of the two common senses of Argument, and, accordingly, I try to define and give the identity conditions of Johnson-arguments. Finally, I disagree with Johnson on the nature of the definition he thinks he has proposed, and I conclude with observations suggesting that his logical perspective has dialectical and rhetorical components.     

The Elusive Notion of “Argument Quality”

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 (1) whether reasons are acceptable, (2) whether reasons are sufficient to justify the conclusion, and (3) 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.     

Korsgaard’s Other Argument for Interpersonal Morality: the Argument from the Sufficiency of Agency

Christine Korsgaard’s (1996, 2009) argument for the claim that one should not only value one’s own humanity but also the humanity of all other persons, ‘the publicity of reasons argument’, has been heavily criticized and I believe rightly so. However, both in an early paper (1986) and in her most recent work (forthcoming), Korsgaard does not rely on controversial, Wittgensteinian ideas regarding the publicity of reasons, but instead she uses a different argument to justify interpersonal morality, which I will refer to as ‘the argument from the sufficiency of agency’. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the argument from the sufficiency of agency can succeed where the publicity of reasons argument fails. I will argue that although the argument from the sufficiency of agency is potentially more promising, it fails to justify a categorical and universal principle of interpersonal morality. I argue, however, that this failure has less to do with the argument from the sufficiency of agency itself and more with Korsgaard’s specific version of it. This leaves open the possibility that other Kantian constructivist arguments from the sufficiency of agency might be more successful.     

Comments on Plantinga’s Argument of Transworld Identity

Plantinga’s conception of possible worlds is problematic in one sense: it relies on the prior idea of modality. His strategy for resolving the puzzle of transworld identity is significant in the metaphysical sense but fruitless in the epistemological sense because world-indexed properties cannot be used as effectively in epistemic practice as their counterparts, i.e., space- and time-indexed properties. His isolation of transworld identification from transworld identity is unconvincing. This paper argues that the intelligibility of modal discourse and reference is the essence of transworld identity. It is also proved that transworld identification is the epistemic ground of such intelligibility. Hence, the transworld identification problem is the epistemological foundation of the transworld identity problem, and there must be a comprehensive answer to the former.     

Kalmár's Argument Against the Plausibility of Church's Thesis

In his famous paper, An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory, Alonzo Church (1936) identified the intuitive notion of effective calculability with the mathematically precise notion of recursiveness. This proposal, known as Church's Thesis, has been widely accepted. Only a few papers have been written against it. One of these is László Kalmár's An Argument Against the Plausibility of Church's Thesis from 1959. The aim of this paper is to present Kalmár's argument and to fill in missing details based on his general philosophical thoughts on mathematics.     

Muller’s Critique of the Argument for Aim-Oriented Empiricism

For over 30 years I have argued that we need to construe science as accepting a metaphysical proposition concerning the comprehensibility of the universe. In a recent paper, Fred Muller criticizes this argument, and its implication that Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism is untenable. In the present paper I argue that Muller’s criticisms are not valid. The issue is of some importance, for my argument that science accepts a metaphysical proposition is the first step in a broader argument intended to demonstrate that we need to bring about a revolution in science, and ultimately in academic inquiry as a whole so that the basic aim becomes wisdom and not just knowledge.     

Concerning the resilience of Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument

Against its prominent compatiblist and libertarian opponents, I defend Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument for the impossibility of moral responsibility. Against John Martin Fischer, I argue that the Basic Argument does not rely on the premise that an agent can be responsible for an action only if he is responsible for every factor contributing to that action. Against Alfred Mele and Randolph Clarke, I argue that it is absurd to believe that an agent can be responsible for an action when no factor contributing to that action is up to that agent. Against Derk Pereboom and Clarke, I argue that the versions of agent-causal libertarianism they claim can immunize the agent to the Basic Argument actually fail to do so. Against Robert Kane, I argue that the Basic Argument does not rely on the premise that simply the presence of indeterministic factors in the process of bringing an action about is itself what rules out the agent’s chance for being responsible for that action.     

Salvaging the Biological Design Argument in Light of Darwinism?

It is a common assumption that biological organisms appear as though they were designed. Prior to the Darwinian revolution, the order of biological organisms was often taken as a sign of their divine Creator. It is also commonly argued that Darwinian evolutionary theory as a good explanation for the adaptive complexity of biology reveals this appearance to be merely an illusion. However, in recent philosophical discussion several defenses of the compatibility of divine design and Darwinian evolution have emerged. These defenses insist not only that divine design and evolution are compatible, but even that biological organisms can continue to function as pointers to the Creator, even in a Darwinian cosmos. This article explores and extends these recent arguments. I analyze four different strategies for arguing that the wisdom of the Creator is apparent in biological organisms. The basic underlying assumption is that the products of some larger whole can reflect the rationality and designedness of that whole.     

Davidson’s Phenomenological Argument Against the Cognitive Claims of Metaphor

Axiomathes - In this paper, I take a critical look at the Davidsonian argument that metaphorical sentences do not express propositions because of the phenomenological experience—seeing one...     

On Behalf of J. S. Mill's ‘Assumption of Infallibility’ Argument

According to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, individual ‘spirits’ – the souls of humans and non-human animals – are extended but cannot be physically divided. His contemporaries and recent commentators have charged that More has never given an explication of the grounds on which the indivisibility of spirits is based. In this article, I suggest that exploring the usage that More makes of the analogy between spirits and light could go some way towards providing such an explication. More compares the relation between spirit and matter to the relation that, according to Aristotelian theories of light, holds between ‘intentional species’ and matter. I will argue that the purpose of his comparison is to highlight that both intentional species and spirits are existentially independent from matter. The existential independence of intentional species from matter expresses itself in the fact that light is not moved through the motion of the illuminated body. The existential independence of spirits from matter expresses itself in the fact that when a body that is coextensive with a spirit is divided, the spirit is not thereby divided but rather contracts into the remaining living organism.     

On Defining ‘Argument’

There is no concept more central to logic and critical thinking than the concept of an argument. I here address the definition of ‘argument’ in the logical sense of the term and defend the claim that many current proposals, once they are interpreted in a way that makes them sufficiently precise, are extensionally inadequate. Definitions found in some contemporary, prominent critical thinking textbooks will serve as a springboard. I claim that each may be interpreted in an absolutist way (i.e., as providing a definition of ‘argument’ simpliciter) or a relativistic way (as providing a definition of ‘argument-for-S’, where S is some agent or group of agents), yet all turn out to be objectionable no matter which route is taken. I finish with a proposal on which the definition of ‘argument’ is an absolutist one, yet one that avoids the problems discussed for the earlier proposals.     

Story Problems: Where Do the Agonists of the Dialogue Model of Argument Interact?

When discussing dialogue, argumentation researchers rarely draw the distinction between the story world and interactional world. While mediators often help to shape the interactions among agonists in the emerging flow of spoken discourse, writers of postulated dialogues narrate them, constructing a story world that depicts the agonists, depicts their utterances and their circumstances. In this paper, I ask where the agonists of the dialogue model of argument interact, and I show that they often interact in the story world of postulated dialogues. Postulated dialogues are story problem conversations. Common in textbooks, exams, and standardized tests, story problems create hypothetical situations to illustrate formal relationships among variables, and are designed to be read in a theoretical attitude that treats the characters, objects, and circumstances that they depict as given. When argumentation researchers examine postulated dialogues, they tend to adopt a theoretical attitude, limiting their analysis to the conversation between the agonists depicted in the story world. Reading this way makes it easier to overlook the interactional world where the writing and reading of the texts takes place, obscuring the fact that they are narrated dialogues, often written by researchers. Reading this way also makes it easier to confirm the traditional participation framework of the dialogue model of argument.     

An Empirical Critique of Two Versions of the Doomsday Argument – Gott's Line and Leslie's Wedge

I discuss two versions of the doomsday argument. According to ``Gott's Line',the fact that the human race has existed for 200,000 years licences the predictionthat it will last between 5100 and 7.8 million more years. According to ``Leslie'sWedge', the fact that I currently exist is evidence that increases the plausibilityof the hypothesis that the human race will come to an end sooner rather than later.Both arguments rest on substantive assumptions about the sampling process thatunderlies our observations. These sampling assumptions have testable consequences,and so the sampling assumptions themselves must be regarded as empirical claims.The result of testing some of these consequences is that both doomsday argumentsare empirically disconfirmed.     

A New Argument for Pragmatism?

Shah, N. The Philosophical Quarterly, 56, 481–498 (2006) has defended evidentialism on the premise that only it (and not pragmatism) is consistent with both (a) the deliberative constraint on reasons and (b) the transparency feature of belief. I show, however, that the deliberative constraint on reasons is also problematic for evidentialism. I also suggest a way for pragmatism to be construed so as to make it consistent with both (a) and (b) and argue that a similar move is not available to the evidentialist. Thus, far from settling the debate in favour of evidentialism, considerations concerning the deliberative constraint on reasons support pragmatism.     

Is There a Simple Argument for Higher-Order Representation Theories of Awareness Consciousness?

William Lycan has articulated “a simple argument” for higher-order representation (HOR) theories of a variety of consciousness sometimes labeled ‘awareness consciousness’ (Lycan, Analysis 61.1, January 3–4, 2001). The purpose of this article is to critically assess the influential argument-strategy of the simple argument. I argue that, as stated, the simple argument fails since it is invalid. Moreover, I argue that an obvious “quick fix” would beg the question against competing same-order representation (SOR) theories of awareness consciousness. I then provide a reconstruction of the argument and argue that although the reconstructed argument deserves consideration, it is also too simple as stated. In particular, it raises several controversial questions about the nature of mental representation. These questions must be addressed before a verdict as to the cogency of the HOR argument-strategy can be reached. But since the questions are controversial, a cogent argument for HOR theories of awareness consciousness is unlikely to be simple.

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A New Argument for Evidentialism?

In his “A new argument for evidentialism” (Shah, Philos Q 56(225): 481–498, 2006), Nishi Shah argues that the best explanation of a feature of deliberation whether to believe that p which he calls transparency entails that only evidence can be reason to believe that p. I show that his argument fails because a crucial lemma that his argument appeals to cannot be supported without assuming evidentialism to be true in the first place.     

Rethinking Gibbard’s Riverboat Argument

According to the Principle of Conditional Non-Contradiction (CNC), conditionals of the form “If p, q” and “If p, not q” cannot both be true, unless p is inconsistent. This principle is widely regarded as an adequacy constraint on any semantics that attributes truth conditions to conditionals. Gibbard has presented an example of a pair of conditionals that, in the context he describes, appear to violate CNC. He concluded from this that conditionals lack truth conditions. We argue that this conclusion is rash by proposing a new diagnosis of what is going on in Gibbard’s argument. We also provide empirical evidence in support of our proposal.     

On Quine’s Translation Argument

Quine's translation argumnent figures centrally in his views on logic. The goal of this paper is to get clear on that argument. It can be interpreted as an argument to the effect that one should never translate somebody’s speech as going against a law of the translator’s logic. Key to this reading of the translation argument is the premise that one should never translate somebody's speech such that their speech is unintelligible. Ultimately, it is my aim to reject this reading. I argue that only a weaker conclusion—one that says “not most of the time” instead of the stronger “never”—should be attributed to Quine. Accordingly, I propose and defend a weaker version of the first premise that better coheres with the weaker conclusion of the translation argument. Instead of the claim that one should never translate somebody’s speech such that their speech is unintelligible I argue that we should only ascribe to Quine the claim that one should not most of the time translate somebody’s speech in a way that makes it unintelligible. I go on to  sum up the results of my discussion and respond to a criticism of my reading.