Whose Toulmin, and which logic? A response to van Benthem

In a recent paper, “One Logician’s Perspective on Argumentation”, van Benthem expressed his reservations on Toulmin’s diagnosis and abandonment of formal logic, and argued that Toulmin was wrong for leading the study of argumentation apart from formal approach. In this paper we will try to reveal two se-rious misunderstandings of Toulmin’s ideas in his discussions, and thereby make an apology for Toulmin

Inference and argument in informal logic

We can provisionally distinguish inference as logically drawing some new result out of given information from argument as advancing reasons in support of a challenged claim. Blair and Johnson place inference beyond the scope of informal logic, and Tou lmin considers inference to be the connection of premises with conclusion in a strong argument. Both approaches are inadequate to inference as distinguished here, and partly as a consequence argument analysts tend unwittingly to mark the distinction as t hat between linked and convergent arguments. Here I urge that there are advantages to treating inference as inference

2011-2012 undergraduate and graduate programs bulletin

This academic catalog contains a description of the University of South Carolina at Aiken, undergraduate and graduate curriculum, courses of study, and requirements for admission

2013-2014 undergraduate and graduate programs bulletin

This academic catalog contains a description of the University of South Carolina at Aiken, undergraduate and graduate curriculum, courses of study, and requirements for admission

2012-2013 undergraduate and graduate programs bulletin

This academic catalog contains a description of the University of South Carolina at Aiken, undergraduate and graduate curriculum, courses of study, and requirements for admission

2014-2015 undergraduate and graduate programs bulletin

This academic catalog contains a description of the University of South Carolina at Aiken, undergraduate and graduate curriculum, courses of study, and requirements for admission

Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies - Part 1

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue titled "Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies" - Part 1 that was published in the journal Philosophies

Metasemantics and fuzzy mathematics

The present thesis is an inquiry into the metasemantics of natural languages, with a particular focus on the philosophical motivations for countenancing degreed formal frameworks for both psychosemantics and truth-conditional semantics. Chapter 1 sets out to offer a bird's eye view of our overall research project and the key questions that we set out to address. Chapter 2 provides a self-contained overview of the main empirical findings in the cognitive science of concepts and categorisation. This scientific background is offered in light of the fact that most variants of psychologically-informed semantics see our network of concepts as providing the raw materials on which lexical and sentential meanings supervene. Consequently, the metaphysical study of internalistically-construed meanings and the empirical study of our mental categories are overlapping research projects. Chapter 3 closely investigates a selection of species of conceptual semantics, together with reasons for adopting or disavowing them. We note that our ultimate aim is not to defend these perspectives on the study of meaning, but to argue that the project of making them formally precise naturally invites the adoption of degreed mathematical frameworks (e.g. probabilistic or fuzzy). In Chapter 4, we switch to the orthodox framework of truth-conditional semantics, and we present the limitations of a philosophical position that we call "classicism about vagueness". In the process, we come up with an empirical hypothesis for the psychological pull of the inductive soritical premiss and we make an original objection against the epistemicist position, based on computability theory. Chapter 5 makes a different case for the adoption of degreed semantic frameworks, based on their (quasi-)superior treatments of the paradoxes of vagueness. Hence, the adoption of tools that allow for graded membership are well-motivated under both semantic internalism and semantic externalism. At the end of this chapter, we defend an unexplored view of vagueness that we call "practical fuzzicism". Chapter 6, viz. the final chapter, is a metamathematical enquiry into both the fuzzy model-theoretic semantics and the fuzzy Davidsonian semantics for formal languages of type-free truth in which precise truth-predications can be expressed

2015-2016 undergraduate and graduate programs bulletin

This academic catalog contains a description of the University of South Carolina at Aiken, undergraduate and graduate curriculum, courses of study, and requirements for admission

2016-2017 undergraduate and graduate programs bulletin

This academic catalog contains a description of the University of South Carolina at Aiken, undergraduate and graduate curriculum, courses of study, and requirements for admission