Burden of proof

This paper presents an analysis of the concept of burden of proof in argument. Relationship of burden of proof to three traditional informal fallacies is considered: (i) argumentum ad hominem, (ii) petitio principii, and (iii) argumentum ad ignorantiam. Other topics discussed include persuasive dialoque, pragmatic reasoning, legal burden of proof, plausible reasoning in regulated disputes, rules of dialogue, and the value of reasoned dialogue.     

Death and dying in medicine: What questions are still worth asking?

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

Begging the question as a pragmatic fallacy

The aim of this paper is to make it clear how and why begging the question should be seen as a pragmatic fallacy which can only be properly evaluated in a context of dialogue. Included in the paper is a review of the contemporary literature on begging the question that shows the gradual emergence over the past twenty years or so of the dialectical conception of this fallacy. A second aim of the paper is to investigate a number of general problems raised by the pragmatic framework.The work in this paper was supported by a Fellowship from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) and a Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Thanks are due to Erik Krabbe for discussions, and to the members of the NIAS Research Group on Fallacies as Violations of Rules of Argumentative Discourse: Frans van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, Sally Jackson, Scott Jacobs, Agnes Haft van Rees, Agnes Verbiest, Charles Willard, and John Woods.     

Retroactive interference in single-cue probability learning

Abstract.— When two single-cue probability learning tasks with different amounts of unpredictable variance were learned in succession. a low variance task interfered with the retention of a high variance task, but the opposite was not true. The effects were positive in that they enabled the subjects to reach a higher response consistency and, thus, a higher level of achievement. It was suggested that the subjects made use of the low variance task to reject incorrect hypotheses about the cue-criterion relation and that interference from an interpolated task occurs only when this task provides information which has functional value for the subject.