A General Structure for Legal Arguments About Evidence Using Bayesian Networks

A Bayesian network (BN) is a graphical model of uncertainty that is especially well suited to legal arguments. It enables us to visualize and model dependencies between different hypotheses and pieces of evidence and to calculate the revised probability beliefs about all uncertain factors when any piece of new evidence is presented. Although BNs have been widely discussed and recently used in the context of legal arguments, there is no systematic, repeatable method for modeling legal arguments as BNs. Hence, where BNs have been used in the legal context, they are presented as completed pieces of work, with no insights into the reasoning and working that must have gone into their construction. This means the process of building BNs for legal arguments is ad hoc, with little possibility for learning and process improvement. This article directly addresses this problem by describing a method for building useful legal arguments in a consistent and repeatable way. The method complements and extends recent work by Hepler, Dawid, and Leucari (2007) on object‐oriented BNs for complex legal arguments and is based on the recognition that such arguments can be built up from a small number of basic causal structures (referred to as idioms). We present a number of examples that demonstrate the practicality and usefulness of the method.     

Comprehending Noun Phrase Arguments and Adjuncts

Two experiments investigated how readers comprehend noun phrase (NP) arguments and adjuncts. Previous research suggested that argument phrases are processed more quickly than adjunct phrases (Clifton, Speer, & Abney, 1991; Kennison, 1999; Schütze & Gibson, 1999; Speer & Clifton, 1998). The present experiments investigated whether the type of verb in the sentence context could influence how NP arguments and adjuncts were processed. Reading time was measured on sentences containing NP arguments and adjuncts preceded either by verbs occurring most frequently with NP arguments (biased transitive verbs) or by verbs occurring most frequently without NP arguments (biased intransitive verbs) (e.g., Meredith read/performed every play/week.). In Experiment 1, reading time was measured using a self-paced phrase-by-phrase moving window. In Experiment 2, reading time was measured using eye tracking. The results of both experiments indicated that, following biased transitive verbs, NP arguments were processed more quickly than NP adjuncts. When NPs followed biased intransitive verbs, there was no significant difference between the processing time of NP arguments and adjuncts.     

Between ontological hubris and epistemic humility: Collingwood,Kant and the role of transcendental arguments

ABSTRACT

This paper explores and defends a form of transcendental argument that is neither bold in its attempt to answer the sceptic, as ambitious transcendental strategies, nor epistemically humble, as modest transcendental strategies. While ambitious transcendental strategies seek (but fail) to meet the sceptical challenge, and modest transcendental strategies accept the validity of the challenge but retreat to a position of epistemic humility, this form of transcendental argument denies the assumption that undergirds the challenge, namely that truth and falsity may be legitimately predicated of the conditions of knowledge. As a result, although this form of transcendental argument is not truth-directed, it is not vulnerable to a charge that is often levelled against modest transcendental arguments, namely that they amount to the adoption of a strategy of sophisticated capitulation. This form of transcendental argument, which is implicit in Collingwood’s conception of philosophy as the search for absolute presuppositions, takes transcendental arguments in a pragmatic direction that does not leave the framework of transcendental idealism intact. It nonetheless remains true to Kant’s conception of philosophy as a second-order activity and to his goal of defending our entitlement to hold on both to the standpoint of theoretical and that of practical reason.     

Falsifiability of political opinions

The concept of "falsifiability," taken from philosophy of science, was applied to the individual's political reasoning. 131 undergraduates, taking a position on the nuclear power issue, estimated: (a) importance attached to factual arguments supporting held opinion, and (b) degree of opinion change evoked by hypothetical disconfirmation of the arguments. The relation between these estimates was analyzed in two respects: (1) the difference served as an indicator of opinion falsifiability, and (2) the correlation served as an indicator of rationality, inasmuch as rationality dictates that disconfirmation of important arguments will evoke a more considerable opinion change than disconfirmation of unimportant arguments. Results showed that nuclear power opponents and subjects holding radically formulated opinions were more reluctant to opinion falsification, whereas degree of involvement in the issue was of no importance. No significant differences in rationality were observed, although additional analyses showed subjects to be more sensitive to disconfirmation of accepted, but opinion contradicting, arguments than to disconfirmation of opinion supporting arguments.     

What <Emphasis Type="Italic">is</Emphasis> wrong with intelligent design?

While a great deal of abuse has been directed at intelligent design theory (ID), its starting point is a fact about biological organisms that cries out for explanation, namely “specified complexity” (SC). Advocates of ID deploy three kind of argument from specified complexity to the existence of a designer: an eliminative argument, an inductive argument, and an inference to the best explanation. Only the first of these merits the abuse directed at it; the other two arguments are worthy of respect. If they fail, it is only because we have a better explanation of SC, namely Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.     

How to avoid begging the question against evolutionary debunking arguments

Evolutionary debunking arguments aim to undercut the epistemological status of our evaluative beliefs on the basis of the genesis of our belief‐forming tendencies. This paper addresses the issue whether responses to these arguments must be question‐begging. It argues for a pragmatic understanding of question‐beggingness, according to which whether an argument is question‐begging depends on the argumentative context. After laying out the debunking argument, the paper considers a variety of responses. It asks whether metaethical responses, such as Sharon Street’s response that relies on a version of antirealism, can avoid begging the question. It argues that so‐called ‘third‐factor’ responses, which rely on substantive evaluative views, are not question‐begging in all contexts. Similarly, it argues, my own ‘quasi‐tracking’ response is not question‐begging in all contexts. Finally, the paper asks whether responses to the debunking argument can avoid begging the question against someone who is convinced at the outset that the argument is sound.     

Evaluating the Meta-Slope: Is there a Slippery Slope Argument against Slippery Slope Arguments?

Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) have often been viewed as inherently weak arguments, to be classified together with traditional fallacies of reasoning and argumentation such as circular arguments and arguments from ignorance. Over the last two decades several philosophers have taken a kinder view, often providing historical examples of the kind of gradual change on which slippery slope arguments rely. Against this background, Enoch (2001, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 21(4), 629–647) presented a novel argument against SSA use that itself invokes a slippery slope. Specifically, he argued that the very reasons that can make SSAs strong arguments mean that we should be poor at abiding by the distinction between good and bad SSAs, making SSAs inherently undesirable. We argue that Enoch’s meta-level SSA fails on both conceptual and empirical grounds.     

The Probabilities of Conditionals Revisited

According to what is now commonly referred to as “the Equation” in the literature on indicative conditionals, the probability of any indicative conditional equals the probability of its consequent of the conditional given the antecedent of the conditional. Philosophers widely agree in their assessment that the triviality arguments of Lewis and others have conclusively shown the Equation to be tenable only at the expense of the view that indicative conditionals express propositions. This study challenges the correctness of that assessment by presenting data that cast doubt on an assumption underlying all triviality arguments.     

Who Needs Valid Moral Arguments? (Dedicated to the Memory of R.M. Chisholm, 1916–1999)

Why have so many philosophers agonised over the possibility of valid arguments from factual premises to moral conclusions? I suggest that they have done so, because of worries over a sceptical argument that has as one of its premises, `All moral knowledge must be non-inferential, or, if inferential, based on valid arguments or strong inductive arguments from factual premises'. I argue that this premise is false.     

An Intuitionist Theory of Argument Strength in Politics: How Intuitive Cognitive Biases Produce Universally Strong Arguments

Why are some political arguments more persuasive than others? Extant theories have mainly explained argument strength with reference to familiarity. Such explanations suggest that arguments are only strong for particular populations: those living in particular cultures, those following particular news, or those holding particular political values. Here, we argue for and identify the existence of a universally strong class of arguments transcending such divides: arguments that are congruent with intuitively held cognitive biases. We focus on arguments about social welfare that are congruent with a particular cognitive bias: the deservingness heuristic. Embedding a novel experiment in representative surveys in the United States, Japan, and Denmark, we demonstrate that people intuitively process arguments that resonate with this heuristic and that such arguments are strong across cultural divides, across individual levels of familiarity with the arguments, and across individual differences in political values. Finally, against the idea that intuitive arguments are simplistic, we demonstrate that such arguments can be inferentially complex, as long as they resonate with a cognitive bias.     

Do incompatible arguments cause extensive processing in the evaluation of arguments? The role of congruence between argument compatibility and argument quality

Previous studies have demonstrated that arguments incompatible with prior beliefs are subjected to more extensive refutational processing, scrutinized longer, and judged to be weaker than arguments compatible with prior beliefs. However, this study suggests whether extensive processing is implemented when evaluating arguments is not decided by argument compatibility, but by congruence between two evaluating tendencies elicited by both argument compatibility and argument quality. Consistent with this perspective, the results of two experiments show that relative to congruent arguments, participants judged arguments eliciting incongruent evaluating tendencies as less extreme in strength, spent more time, and felt more hesitant generating strength judgments for them. The results also show that it is mainly incongruent arguments, not congruent arguments, whose strength ratings were more closely associated with the perceived personal importance of the issue, which intensified the tendency to evaluate arguments depending on argument compatibility. These results suggest that it is the incongruity between argument compatibility and argument quality, and not simply the argument compatibility, that plays a more important role in activating an extensive processing in the evaluation of arguments.     

Evaluating arguments during instigations of defence motivation and accuracy motivation

When people evaluate the strength of an argument, their motivations are likely to influence the evaluation. However, few studies have specifically investigated the influences of motivational factors on argument evaluation. This study examined the effects of defence and accuracy motivations on argument evaluation. According to the compatibility between the advocated positions of arguments and participants' prior beliefs and the objective strength of arguments, participants evaluated four types of arguments: compatible‐strong, compatible‐weak, incompatible‐strong, and incompatible‐weak arguments. Experiment 1 revealed that participants possessing a high defence motivation rated compatible‐weak arguments as stronger and incompatible‐strong ones as weaker than participants possessing a low defence motivation. However, the strength ratings between the high and low defence groups regarding both compatible‐strong and incompatible‐weak arguments were similar. Experiment 2 revealed that when participants possessed a high accuracy motivation, they rated compatible‐weak arguments as weaker and incompatible‐strong ones as stronger than when they possessed a low accuracy motivation. However, participants' ratings on both compatible‐strong and incompatible‐weak arguments were similar when comparing high and low accuracy conditions. The results suggest that defence and accuracy motivations are two major motives influencing argument evaluation. However, they primarily influence the evaluation results for compatible‐weak and incompatible‐strong arguments, but not for compatible‐strong and incompatible‐weak arguments.     

Validation of a category system for arguments in conflict discourse

Theories of individuation predict systematic differences in argumentative behavior between adolescent girls and their mothers. In order to reveal the nature and functions of this kind of discourse, two studies were carried out on 110 mother-daughter pairs. The second study (n=80) replicated and extended the first study (n=30) on an independent sample. The mother-daughter pairs were asked to discuss a subject that had recently been at issue between them. To assess the argumentative behavior, a category system was developed that reflects the functional character of utterances in discourse. The aim of the research was to test the reliability and validity of the category system. Daughters are assumed to verbalize their own needs and preferences to increase the differences to the mother, and to weaken or reject the mother's arguments in an effort to resist control. Mothers, on the other hand, are supposed to exert control over the behavior of their daughters but do so within bounds of mutuality. This should lead to verbal initiatives and attempts to explain, support and modify their positions and arguments. The data showed high reliability of the categorization of arguments. The categories also differentiated between mothers and daughters. Daughters were more likely to try to weaken and reject (and accept) the mother's arguments and to state preferences while mothers tried to support and explain their positions and to retain control by initiating questions and arguments to which the daughters responded.     

Philosophical Error and the Economics of Belief Formation

Recent work has demonstrated that academic research faces serious challenges. Incentives to defend publishable ideas often lead researchers astray. Despite their tendency to produce error, efforts to publish erroneous results typically help a researcher's career. In addition, errors often arise from seemingly innocent methodological assumptions that allow researchers to believe their research is sound. This article discusses this research, as well as research into difficulties facing epistemic rationality caused by nonepistemic incentives. It then applies the lessons of this research to philosophical practice. It explains why philosophy likely suffers from these problems. It then provides an example of a widely shared methodological assumption that allows such research to be pursued and regularly published. It claims that the significance philosophers place on arguments is inappropriate, and that typical evaluations of philosophical arguments involve an instance of the base‐rate fallacy. It concludes by discussing whether or not this article is self‐defeating.     

Two approaches to the problems of self-attacking arguments and general odd-length cycles of attack

The problems that arise from the presence of self-attacking arguments and odd-length cycles of attack within argumentation frameworks are widely recognized in the literature on defeasible argumentation. This paper introduces two simple semantics to capture different intuitions about what kinds of arguments should become justified in such scenarios. These semantics are modeled upon two extensions of argumentation frameworks, which we call sustainable and tolerant. Each one is constructed on the common ground of the powerful concept of admissibility introduced by Dung in [P.M. Dung, On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in non-monotonic reasoning, logic programming, and n-person games, Artificial Intelligence 77 (1995) 321–357]. The novelty of this approach consists in viewing the admissibility of a subset of arguments as relative to potentially challenging subsets of arguments. Both sustainable and tolerant semantics are more credulous than preferred semantics (i.e. they justify at least the same arguments, and possibly more). Given certain sufficient conditions they coincide among them as well as with other semantics introduced by Dung.     

What can debunking do for us (sceptics and nihilists)?

Debunking arguments in metaethics are often presented as particularly challenging for non‐naturalistic versions of moral realism. The first aim of this paper is to explore and defend a response on behalf of non‐naturalism. The second aim of the paper is to argue that although non‐naturalism’s response is satisfactory, this does not mean that debunking arguments are metaethically uninteresting. They have a limited and indirect role to play in the exchange between non‐naturalists and moral error theorists. In the end, debunking arguments can do less for sceptics and nihilists than what is commonly thought, but not nothing.     

On Misrepresenting the Thomistic Five Ways

A number of recent discussions of atheism allude to cosmological arguments in support of theism. The five ways of Aquinas are classic instances, offered as rational justification for theistic belief. However, the five ways receive short shrift. They are curtly dismissed as vacuous, arbitrary, and even insulting to reason. I contend that the atheistic critique of the Thomistic five ways, and similarly formulated cosmological arguments, argues at cross purposes because it misrepresents them. I first lay out the context, intent and structure of Aquinas’ arguments, then show in what way recent discussions misrepresent them, and finally conclude with a comment on metaphysical orientation, which I take to be central, not only to a proper understanding of the Thomistic five ways but generally to the debate between atheism and theism on the existence of God.

Objectivist conditions for defeat and evolutionary debunking arguments

I make a case for distinguishing clearly between subjective and objective accounts of undercutting defeat and for rejecting a hybrid view that takes both subjective and objective elements to be relevant for whether or not a belief is defeated. Moderate subjectivists claim that taking a belief to be defeated is sufficient for the belief to be defeated; subjectivist idealists add that if an idealised agent takes a belief to be defeated then the belief is defeated. Subjectivist idealism evades some of the objections levelled against moderate subjectivism but can be shown to yield inconsistent results in some cases. Both subjectivisms should be rejected. We should be objectivists regarding undercutting defeat. This requirement, however, is likely to be problematic for a popular interpretation of evolutionary debunking arguments in metaethics as it can be shown that existing objectivist accounts of defeat do not support such arguments. I end by discussing the constraints of developing such an account.     

Constitutive elements of the concept of human aggression

An analysis of the constitutive elements of the concept of human aggression is made. These constitutive elements are explications of the analytically true implications of the concept of human aggression as they are imbedded into the structure of “normal” language. The analysis results in the following proposal for a definition of the concept of human aggression. Human aggression is characterized—at least from the point of view of the person affected or a neutral judge—as an inconsiderate or malicious violation of a norm which implies current or potential harm by a person actively responsible; characterizing the violation of the norm as “inconsiderate” or “malicious” implies that no arguments for exoneration (e.g., excuses or justifications) will be accepted. These six constitutive elements of the concept of human aggression are discussed; in particular, the structure of possible arguments for incrimination and exoneration is outlined in detail. Finally, some consequences for future research are drawn from this suggestion for the definition of human aggression.