Questioning the Virtual Friendship Debate: Fuzzy Analogical Arguments from Classification and Definition

Arguments from analogy are pervasive in everyday reasoning, mathematics, philosophy, and science. Informal logic studies everyday argumentation in ordinary language. A branch of fuzzy logic, approximate reasoning, seeks to model facets of everyday reasoning with vague concepts in ill-defined situations. Ways of combining the results from these fields will be suggested by introducing a new argumentation scheme—a fuzzy analogical argument from classification—with the associated critical questions. This will be motivated by a case study of analogical reasoning in the virtual friendship debate within information ethics. The virtual friendship debate is a disagreement over whether virtual friendships are genuine friendships. It will be argued that the debate could move away from its current impasse, caused by unproductive metaphysical and logical assumptions, if extant arguments are reinterpreted as fuzzy analogical arguments from classification, and subjected to a new set of critical questions which would replace the quest for facts of essence about friendship with an emphasis on empirical data, persuasion, and definitional power.     

Scientific Progress,Understanding, and Knowledge: Reply to Park

Dellsén (2016) has recently argued for an understanding-based account of scientific progress, the noetic account, according to which science (or a particular scientific discipline) makes cognitive progress precisely when it increases our understanding of some aspect of the world. I contrast this account with Bird’s (2007, 2015); epistemic account, according to which such progress is made precisely when our knowledge of the world is increased or accumulated. In a recent paper, Park (2017) criticizes various aspects of my account and his arguments in favor of the noetic account as against Bird’s epistemic account. This paper responds to Park’s objections. An important upshot of the paper is that we should distinguish between episodes that constitute and promote scientific progress, and evaluate account of scientific progress in terms of how they classify different episodes with respect to these categories.     

Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution”

The essay concerns the highly controversial pamphlet of Rosa Luxemburg The Russian Revolution (1918/1922), in which Luxemburg criticizes Lenin’s post-revolutionary policies, in particular his dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, an elected body. The essay reviews the history of the text’s publication and the intense debate, which continues to this day, over whether or not Luxemburg changed her mind on its central critique. At stake in the argument is not only Luxemburg’s evaluation of Lenin’s actions but also the correct weighting to be given to the two components in the central Marxist–Leninist dialectic of revolution: spontaneity and consciousness. In elaborating this point the essay brings in examples from the writings of Lukács and Stalin, and also discusses the dialectic’s centrality in socialist realism.     

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.     

Scientific Writing Between Tabloid Storytelling,Arcane Formulaic Hermetism,and Narrative Knowledge

The present discussion contribution argues that O. Müller not only suppresses Goethe’s declared intentions with regard to the latter’s Theory of Colors and ignores his place in what in any case is a different scientific culture than his (Müller’s) own or Newton’s, namely a premodern culture of “narrative knowledge” in the sense specified by Lyotard. Moreover, Müller entangles himself in the paradox of wanting on the one hand to back up Goethe on the level of fact when the latter opposes the militant selfrighteousness of the Newtonian school, but doing so on the other hand by constructing an epic-heroic narrative of Newtonian militance, not to say eristic belligerence contradictory to Goethe’s own “tolerant enlightenment” in Lakatos’ sense. Thus, we are confronted with one of those cases where, as Paul de Man puts it, a multidimensional critical reading on the semiological as well as rhetorical levels shows “that the text does not practice what it preaches” (1979, 5).     

Lenin on democratic theory

Lenin’s State and Revolution is not only a project for imminent revolutionary policy and not only a legitimization argument for a revolutionary dictatorship, but also a theory of state and theory of democracy. Lenin points at the reduplication of state organs that is inherent in a democratic state. While the Russian revolutionary thinks of this reduplication as something transitory, we today increasingly see it as a durable condition coterminous with the late-modern democratic state. I use Lenin’s treatise as a point of inspiration to briefly characterize my dialectical theory of state.     

Anger and sadness in response to an emotionally neutral film: evidence for age-specific associations with well-being

When the association between emotion and well-being is being considered, positive emotions usually come to mind. However, negative emotions serve important adaptive functions and particular negative emotions may be especially adaptive at different stages of adult development. We examined the associations between self-reported negative emotions in response to an emotionally neutral, thematically ambiguous film and subjective well-being among 76 young (age 20-29), 73 middle-aged (age 40-49), and 73 older (age 60-69) adults. Results indicated that higher self-reported anger in response to the film was associated with higher well-being for middle-aged adults, but not for young and older adults. Higher self-reported sadness in response to the film was associated with higher well-being for older adults, but not for young and middle-aged adults. These findings were stronger for cognitive well-being (i.e., satisfaction with life) than for affective well-being (i.e., ratio of dispositional positive to negative affect) and were specific to these emotions (not found for self-reported disgust or fear) and to the emotionally neutral film (not found for sad or disgusting films). Results are discussed in terms of the functions that anger and sadness are thought to serve and the control opportunities afforded in midlife and late life that render these functions differentially adaptive.     

Learning to Make Selection and Detection Decisions: The Roles of Base Rate and Feedback

The effects of type of feedback and base rate on threshold learning in a multiple‐cue decision task were examined. In most such decision experiments, participants receive feedback after every trial (full feedback), and a single base rate (usually 0.5) is used. Our experiment explored conditional feedback (feedback only after positive decisions) representing common selection and detection tasks (such as hiring), where the decision maker receives no feedback unless the decision is positive (e.g., hire the applicant). We used three base rates (0.2, 0.5, and 0.8). As expected, performance was best in full feedback, but after 300 learning trials, the difference was small. Conditional feedback generally resulted in fewer positive decisions than full feedback, but this difference was not found in the low (0.2) base rate condition. There were interactions between base rates and types of feedback. Results provide partial support for the constructivist encoding hypothesis of Elwin and colleagues. Simulation results suggest that our results may reflect overconfidence when feedback is not given. With respect to rate of learning, when the base rate was 0.2, conditional feedback participants reached approximately the same selection rate but did so more slowly than the full feedback participants. Partial feedback participants learned slower and appeared to be still learning after 500 trials. When the base rate was 0.5 or 0.8, partial feedback was nearly as good as full feedback, but conditional feedback resulted in a systematically lower rate of positive decisions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.