VI—The Philebus on Pleasure: The Good, the Bad and the False

In Plato's Philebus Socrates and Protarchus dispute whether pleasure, like belief, can be false. Their dispute illustrates a broader pattern of disagreement between them about how to evaluate pleasure. Of two contrasting conceptions of false pleasure—derived from work by Bernard Williams and by Sabina Lovibond respectively—false pleasure of the Lovibond type best answers the challenge to which Protarchus' resistance gives rise. Socrates' own example of false pleasure may be read in this way, in contrast to its prevailing interpretation, and this alternative reading seems better suited to the argument's context, both immediate and distant.     

The Doomsday Argument and the Simulation Argument

The Doomsday Argument and the Simulation Argument share certain structural features, and hence are often discussed together (Bostrom 2003, Are you living in a computer simulation, Philosophical Quarterly, 53:243–255; Aranyosi 2004, The Doomsday Simulation Argument. Or why isn’t the end nigh, and you’re not living in a simulation, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/190/; Richmond 2008, Doomsday, Bishop Ussher and simulated worlds, Ratio, 21:201–217; Bostrom and Kulczycki 2011 A patch for the Simulation Argument, Analysis, 71:54–61). Both are cases where reflecting on one’s location among a set of possibilities yields a counter-intuitive conclusion—in the first case that the end of humankind is closer than you initially thought, and in the second case that it is more likely than you initially thought that you are living in a computer simulation. Indeed, the two arguments do have some structural similarities. But there are also significant disanalogies between the two arguments, and I argue that these disanalogies mean that the Simulation Argument succeeds and the Doomsday Argument fails.     

The Revelation Argument. A 'Communicational Fallacy'

In this paper it is argued that much can be gained for the analysis and evaluation of arguing when fallacies are not, or not only, conceived of as flawed premise–conclusion complexes but rather as argumentative moves which distort harmfully an interaction aiming at resolving communication problems argumentatively. Starting from Normative Pragmatics and the pragma-dialectical concept of fallacy, a case study is presented to illustrate a fallacy which is termed the 'revelation argument' because it is characterized by an interactor's revealing her thoughts and/or emotions to the addressees and claiming that these would have justificatory or refutatory potential with respect to the problem discussed. Although the revelation argument may not be a paradigm case of resolution- hindering moves, it is an extreme case of flawed reasoning that illustrates plainly the advantages of a communicational perspective on arguing and fallacies.     

对威廉姆斯关于《理想国》意义类比规则和整体-部分规则互相冲突的论证的初步探讨

威廉姆斯(Williams)在1973年发表的<柏拉图(理想国)中城邦与灵魂的类比>("The Analogy of City and Soul in Plato's Republic")中认为,在柏拉图的<理想国>中,367 e 6-369 b 4与434 d 2-435 c 8中城邦正义和个人灵魂正义的两个类比与435 e 1-436 a 7之间存在内在冲突,并给出了相应的论证.本论文将深入分析这些论证,从而检验威廉姆斯的上述观点是否具有强大的说服力.     

Analysing the Good Will: Kant's Argument in the First Section of the Groundwork

This article contends that the first section of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals provides a sophisticated and valid argument, and that commentators are therefore mistaken in dismissing this section as flawed. In particular, the article undertakes to show that in this section Kant argues from a conception of the goodness of a good will to two distinctive features of moral goodness, and from these features to his ‘formula of universal law’. The article reveals the sophistication and validity of this argument by considering it in the light of a number of criticisms that are commonly levelled at the section. In conclusion, the article proposes that this interpretation of the section also has significant implications for the understanding of Kant's method, his formulas and his basic conception of the ‘moral’.     

The influence of symbolic literacy on memory: testing Plato's hypothesis.

The present study examined the influence of the production of external symbols on memory strategies. Plato hypothesized that dependency on writing as an external memory store would be deterimental to memory. Three experiments were conducted to explore this hypothesis. Participants played Concentration, a memory game where players must find matching pairs of cards placed face down in an array. Participants were allowed to make notes to aid their performance under some experimental conditions, while under other conditions they could not. In Experiments 1 and 2, the unexpected removal of participants' notes revealed that the performance benefit was due to notes acting as a form of external memory storage, rather than as an aid to encoding information in memory. Experiment 3 qualified these findings by demonstrating that the identity of each card was retained in memory, while the location of each card tended to be stored in the participants' external notations. These data suggest a modified interpretation of Plato's hypothesis in that symbolic literacy may change how we remember information. Rather than storing all information in memory, we only have to retain the information necessary to use the much larger storage capacity of the external system. Thus, the introduction of external symbols allows for a change in how memory is adaptively distributed.     

Good News for Moral Error Theorists: A Master Argument Against Companions in Guilt Strategies

Moral error theories are often rejected by appeal to ‘companions in guilt’ arguments. The most popular form of companions in guilt argument takes epistemic reasons for belief as a ‘companion’ and proceeds by analogy. I show that this strategy fails. I claim that the companions in guilt theorist must understand epistemic reasons as evidential support relations if her argument is to be dialectically effective. I then present a dilemma. Either epistemic reasons are evidential support relations or they are not. If they are not, then the companions in guilt argument fails. If they are, then a reduction of epistemic reasons to evidential support relations becomes available and, consequently, epistemic reasons cease to be a viable ‘companion’ for moral reasons. I recommend this structure of argument over existing strategies within the literature and defend my claims against recent objections from companions in guilt theorists.     

The Role of Argument in Negotiation

The purpose of this paper is to show the pervasive, though often implicit, role of arguments in negotiation dialogue. This holds even for negotiations that start from a difference of interest such as mere bargaining through offers and counteroffers. But it certainly holds for negotiations that try to settle a difference of opinion on policy issues. It will be demonstrated how a series of offers and counteroffers in a negotiation dialogue contains a reconstructible series of implicit persuasion dialogues. The paper is a sequel to van Laar and Krabbe (2017), in which we showed that for some differences of opinion it may be reasonable to shift from persuasion dialogue, aimed at a resolution of the difference on the merits, to negotiation dialogue, aimed at compromise, whereas in the present paper we show that such a shift need not amount to the abandonment of argumentation. Our main aim in this paper as well as in the previous one is to contribute to the theory of argumentation within the context of negotiation and compromise formation.     

The Uses of Argument in Mathematics

Stephen Toulmin once observed that ‘it has never been customary for philosophers to pay much attention to the rhetoric of mathematical debate’ [Toulmin et al., 1979, An Introduction to Reasoning, Macmillan, London, p. 89]. Might the application of Toulmin’s layout of arguments to mathematics remedy this oversight? Toulmin’s critics fault the layout as requiring so much abstraction as to permit incompatible reconstructions. Mathematical proofs may indeed be represented by fundamentally distinct layouts. However, cases of genuine conflict characteristically reflect an underlying disagreement about the nature of the proof in question.