Arguers as editors

People use editorial criteria to decide whether to say or to suppress potential arguments. These criteria constitute people's standards as to what effective and appropriate arguments are like, and reflect general interaction goals. A series of empirical investigations has indicated that the standards fall into three classes: those having to do with argument effectiveness, those concerned with personal issues for arguer and target, and those centered on discourse quality. The essay also sketches the affinities certain types of people have for the different criteria.     

司法论证充分性辨析

司法论证充分性问题是一个和法学理论与司法实践都密切相关的问题,各种关于法律论证的争议是和规则治理与纠纷解决两种司法职能的互相冲撞息息相关的。什么样的法律论证才是最合适的,在法律资源有限的情况下,如何运用有限的资源达到司法实践的目的,是各国法制建设的一个永恒话题。文章试图以我国的司法情景为例,从理性思考与现实实践两个层面,展示法官在裁决中所运用的具有地方性知识性质的辅助资源具有实践合理性,说明司法论证应该也必须追求其充分性。     

Dibs: In search of self

Abstract

Some ten years ago, while I was training towards ordination as a minister in the Church of England, close friends in the village where I lived took me to a talk given by Michael Jacobs to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of CCC, the Cambridgeshire Consultancy in Counselling, on whose training course my friends, Jenny and David, were then studying.     

On the archetypes in information systems development: An exploration

In this paper I examine possible archetypes that embody the role that systems analyst play in different models of systems development and briefly review attendant epistemological and ontological assumptions.     

Propositions, Sets, and Worlds

If we agree with Michael Jubien that propositions do not exist, while accepting the existence of abstract sets in a realist mathematical ontology, then the combined effect of these ontological commitments has surprising implications for the metaphysics of modal logic, the ontology of logically possible worlds, and the controversy over modal realism versus actualism. Logically possible worlds as maximally consistent proposition sets exist if sets generally exist, but are equivalently expressed as maximally consistent conjunctions of the same propositions in corresponding sets. A conjunction of propositions, even if infinite in extent, is nevertheless itself a proposition. If sets and hence proposition sets exist but propositions do not exist, then whether or not modal realism is true depends on which of two apparently equivalent methods of identifying, representing, or characterizing logically possible worlds we choose to adopt. I consider a number of reactions to the problem, concluding that the best solution may be to reject the conventional model set theoretical concept of logically possible worlds as maximally consistent proposition sets, and distinguishing between the actual world alone as maximally consistent and interpreting all nonactual merely logically possible worlds as submaximal. I am grateful to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), for supporting this among related research projects in philosophical logic and philosophy of mathematics during my Resident Research Fellowship in 2005-2006.     

Peirce’s ‘Prescision’ as a Transcendental Method

Abstract

In this Paper I interpret Charles S. Peirce’s method of prescision as a transcendental method. In order to do so, I argue that Peirce’s pragmatism can be interpreted in a transcendental light only if we use a non‐justificatory understanding of transcendental philosophy. I show how Peirce’s prescision is similar to some abstracting procedure that Immanuel Kant used in his Critique of Pure Reason. Prescision abstracts from experience and thought in general those elements without which such experience and thought would be unaccountable. Similarly, in the Aesthetics, Kant isolated the a priori forms of intuition by showing how they could be abstracted from experience in general, while experience in general cannot be thought without them. However, if Peirce’s and Kant’s methods are similar in this respect, they reached very different conclusions.