Reconstructive Charity, Soundness and the RSA-Criteria of Good Argumentation

This paper discusses an example of social policy argumentation from an opinion of the 2007 majority among the German National Ethics Council (NEC 2007). It is employed to problematize argument reconstruction with respect to the Informal Logic quality criteria relevance, sufficiency, acceptability (RSA) (Johnson & Blair 2006, 11977). The main thesis is conditional and rather weak: If the RSA criteria are sub-stitutes for the notion of soundness, then—next to premise-truth and validity—they also substitute recon-structive charit

Pragma-Dialectic’s Necessary Conditions for a Critical Discussion

I present a “reduced” version of the fifteen Pragma-dialectical rules and inquire into their theoretical status as necessary conditions for a critical discussion. Questions: (i) In what respect is PD’s non-sufficiency a deficiency, (ii) can and (iii) must it be remedied? Brief answers: (i) with respect to defining the concept ‘critical discussion,’ (ii) possibly, (iii) yes, if, and only if, one seeks to identify the concept ‘critical discussion’; no, if PD is for fallacy-detection

Commentary on John R. Welch’s “Conclusions as hedged hypotheses”

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Commentary on: Mark Battersby and Sharon Bailin\u27s Critical thinking and cognitive biases

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The polysemy of ‘fallacy’—or ‘bias’, for that matter

Starting with a brief overview of current usages (Sect. 2), this paper offers some constituents of a use-based analysis of ‘fallacy’, listing 16 conditions that have, for the most part implicitly, been discussed in the literature (Sect. 3). Our thesis is that at least three related conceptions of ‘fallacy’ can be identified. The 16 conditions thus serve to “carve out” a semantic core and to distinguish three core-specifications. As our discussion suggests, these specifications can be related to three normative positions in the philosophy of human reasoning: the meliorist, the apologist, and the panglossian (Sect. 4). Seeking to make these conditions available for scholarly discussion, this analysis-sketch should not be viewed as final or exhaustive

From Features via Frames to Spaces: Modeling Scientific Conceptual Change Without Incommensurability or Aprioricity

The (dynamic) frame model, originating in artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, has recently been applied to change-phenomena traditionally studied within history and philosophy of science. Its application purpose is to account for episodes of conceptual dynamics in the empirical sciences (allegedly) suggestive of incommensurability as evidenced by “ruptures” in the symbolic forms of historically successive empirical theories with similar classes of applications. This article reviews the frame model and traces its development from the feature list model. Drawing on extant literature, examples of frame-reconstructed taxonomic change are presented. This occurs for purposes of comparison with an alternative tool, conceptual spaces. The main claim is that conceptual spaces save the merits of the frame model and provide a powerful model for conceptual change in scientific knowledge, since distinctions arising in measurement theory are native to the model. It is suggested how incommensurability as incomparability of theoretical frameworks might be avoided (thus coming on par with a key-result of applying frames). Moreover, as non(inter-)translatability of worldviews, it need not to be treated as a genuine problem of conceptual representation. The status of laws vis à vis their dimensional bases as well as diachronic similarity measures are (inconclusively) discussed