Audiences and Argument Strength

It is argued that the strength of an argument is relative to the audience to which it is addressed. Often audiences are characterised their preference ordering on values but other aspects are also important: the authorities the audience respects, their attitude to risk and their degree of loss aversion

A Note on Hierarchical Constraints

In recent years a considerable amount of research has been devoted to formal theories of precedential constraint. In this note I consider a recent paper which explores the use of factor hierarchies in this connection. In that work it was shown both that cases constrained with the use of a hierarchy may be unconstrained if the hierarchy is flattened, and that cases unconstrained with a hierarchy may be constrained when the hierarchy is flattened. I discuss the nature of factor hierarchies and attempt to explain these results.</jats:p