Form Of Argument Research Articles

Silence (aphasia) and Laughter: Nietzsche’s Parody and Assessment of Pyrrho in “The Wanderer and His Shadow” 213 and in His Posthumous Sections of 1888

ABSTRACT This article examines Nietzsche’s evaluations of silence and laughter as Pyrrho’s two responses to the dilemma caused by doubts about truth in aphorism 213 of ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’ (WS 213). Contrary to the common belief that speechlessness leads Pyrrho to tranquillity (ataraxia), in WS 213, it is a symptom of his intellectual impotence caused by logical impasse. Silence proves to be subject to the same traps as speeches. In his later period, Nietzsche deems Pyrrho’s impotent will to truth and pursuit of tranquility nihilism. He contends that Pyrrho’s impotence triggers his ressentiment of dogmatists and labels Pyrrho as a Greek Buddhist in unpublished sections writtenin 1888. For Nietzsche, the only antidote to dogmatism and even nihilism is laughter, a way of overcoming Pyrrho’s obstinate will to truth embodied in the form of logical argumentation. Nietzsche seems to attribute the Democritean cheerfulness (euthumia) to Pyrrho, a manifestation of healthy skepticism and a dynamicconstellation of drives that embrace and overcome suffering. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche claims that laughter is a sign of recovery from a spirit of excessive seriousness, which is embodied by the free-spirited Zarathustra, an antipode to Pyrrho ‘the fanatic of mistrust.’

God and Purported Logical Arguments from Evil and Suffering

Abstract Logical arguments from evil against the existence of God are the strongest form of arguments from evil. They maintain that the all-good, all-powerful God of traditional theism is logically incompatible with the evil in the world. Given that the most well-known logical argument from evil remains the argument put forward by John Mackie over fifty years ago, I begin by setting out Mackie’s argument in detail as well as Alvin Plantinga’s well-regarded critique of it. I then discuss Mackie’s not well-known confusing response to Plantinga’s critique along with attempts by Hugh LaFollette and Quentin Smith to support Mackie’s argument, which fail to take into account Mackie’s own concession to Plantinga’s critique. I then discuss my own attempt in 2019 to provide a Mackie-style logical argument from evil and the reception it has received. I end by suggesting that further discussion might best be pursued by taking up the related question of whether an objective ethics can by adequately supported without appealing to the existence of the God of traditional theism.

Strategy Theory Using Analogy: Rationale, Tools and Examples

We discuss why analogical reasoning is widely used in strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation despite its assessment by many logicians as a weak form of logical argumentation. Given this popularity, we consider how analogies might be used to assist in strategic decision making to develop better strategy arguments, including those consistent with the theory-based view of strategy. We develop an extended analogy between the online platforms Tripadvisor and Glassdoor to illustrate our main points. We also describe in steps how to build and evaluate strategy analogies and we suggest why working with analogies may be helpful to those practicing the theory-based view of strategy.

The Effect of Preferences in Abstract Argumentation under a Claim-Centric View

In this paper, we study the effect of preferences in abstract argumentation under a claim-centric perspective. Recent work has revealed that semantical and computational properties can change when reasoning is performed on claim-level rather than on the argument-level, while under certain natural restrictions (arguments with the same claims have the same outgoing attacks) these properties are conserved. We now investigate these effects when, in addition, preferences have to be taken into account and consider four prominent reductions to handle preferences between arguments. As we shall see, these reductions give rise to four new classes of claim-augmented argumentation frameworks. These classes behave differently from each other with respect to semantic properties and computational complexity, but also in connection with structured argumentation formalisms such as assumption-based argumentation. This strengthens the view that the actual choice for handling preferences has to be taken with care.

Ethical Causality and Rebirth in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and Abhidharmakośabhāṣya: A Mirrored Argument

AbstractThis paper focuses on Sāṃkhya-Yoga and Buddhist Abhidharma ontologies and their engagement. A close reading of two hitherto uncompared passages from Pātañjalayogaśāstra 2.13 and Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya 4.94 suggests that they are intertextual or interdiscursive. A mirrored argument form in the texts explains ethical causality (karma) in relation to rebirth (punarjanman). The arguments in both texts are similar in form, sequence, and even conclusion, although not in terms of the doctrinal basis of reasoning. On first examination, both arguments analyse how action (karma) sustains patterns of moral repercussion across life and beyond death in terms of singular and plural causes and effects. But a close reading shows that the level of conceptual engagement on this issue is more nuanced – centred on ‘projecting’ and ‘completing’ mechanisms of karmic retribution (ākṣepaka karman and paripūraka karman) as well as determinate or indeterminate (niyata and aniyata) maturation of karmic effects. The paper suggests that the function of Patañjali’s passage was to serve as a structured engagement with Buddhist Sarvāstivāda karma theory.

Abstract argumentation frameworks with strong and weak constraints

Dealing with controversial information is an important issue in several application contexts. Formal argumentation enables reasoning on arguments for and against a claim to decide on an outcome. Dung's abstract Argumentation Framework (AF) has emerged as a central formalism in argument-based reasoning. Key aspects of the success and popularity of Dung's framework include its simplicity and expressiveness. Integrity constraints help to express domain knowledge in a compact and natural way, thus keeping easy the modeling task even for problems that otherwise would be hard to encode within an AF. In this paper, we first explore two intuitive semantics based on Kleene and Lukasiewicz logics, respectively, for AF augmented with (strong) constraints—the resulting argumentation framework is called Constrained AF (CAF). Then, we propose a new argumentation framework called Weak constrained AF (WAF) that enhances CAF with weak constraints. Intuitively, these constraints can be used to find “optimal” solutions to problems defined through CAF. We provide a detailed complexity analysis of CAF and WAF, showing that strong constraints do not increase the expressive power of AF in most cases, while weak constraints systematically increase the expressive power of CAF (and AF) under several well-known argumentation semantics.

On generalized notions of consistency and reinstatement and their preservation in formal argumentation

We present a conceptualization providing an original domain-independent perspective on two crucial properties in reasoning: consistency and reinstatement. They emerge as a pair of dual characteristics, representing complementary requirements on the outcomes of reasoning processes. Central to our formalization are two underlying parametric relations: incompatibility and reinstatement violation. Different instances of these relations give rise to a spectrum of consistency and reinstatement scenarios. As a demonstration of versatility and expressive power of our approach we provide a characterization of various abstract argumentation semantics which are expressed as combinations of distinct consistency and reinstatement constraints. Moreover, we conduct an investigation into preserving these essential properties across different reasoning stages. Specifically, we delve into scenarios where a labelling is derived from other labellings through a synthesis function, using the synthesis of argument justification as an illustrative instance. We achieve a general characterization of consistency preservation synthesis functions, while we unveil an impossibility result concerning reinstatement preservation, leading us to explore an alternative notion to ensure feasibility. Our exploration reveals a weakness in the traditional definition of argument justification, for which we propose a refined version overcoming this limitation.

University Research, Climate and Organizational Culture in a Peruvian University

Objective: To determine the relationship between the participation of engineering faculty students in university research, climate and organizational culture in a Peruvian university. Theoretical Framework: Science research as a development of scientific competencies is a way of learning production and learning development in the promotion of critical thinking and argumentative forms in the growth and ability to interact among students with scientific level research (Valdiviezo, 2023). Method: The research is basic, non-experimental, descriptive and correlational level; providing scopes for an adequate progress of the strategic objectives of the university institution with a quantitative approach (Hernández & Mendoza, 2018). Methods, techniques and instruments were applied for the collection of information for the treatment, analysis and presentation of results (Sánchez & Reyes, 2015). Results and Discussion: It was evidenced the existence of correlation between the study variables University research and Organizational climate (rho=0.442 and p=0.000<0.05) as well as between University research and Organizational culture (rho=0.328; p=0.000<0.05 ), being a moderate positive correlation. Research Implications: Scientific production is a fundamental part of the university professor's activity and dissemination through the publication of scientific articles has become an essential pillar (Delgado et al., 2021). Originality/Value: The research will contribute to the improvement of scientific research processes in universities by promoting a climate and culture of research character to generate the conditions for the development of research projects and the participation of the university community.

How Academicians Fell for Ramsey’s Canard that Keynes did not Give a Definition of Probability

It was F P Ramsey who first claimed that Keynes had stated that probability was indefinable in his 1922 review of Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability in the January issue of Cambridge Magazine: “Mr Keynes takes probabilities or probability relations as indefinable, and says that if q has to p the probability relation of degree a, then knowledge of p justifies rational belief of degree a.” (Ramsey,1922, p.3). Ramsey made an intellectual mess that made it impossible for a reader to understand what Keynes’s formal relational, propositional logic was. This mess can be fixed to some degree by rewriting it in the following manner-Mr. Keynes takes probability as being indefinable if a single definition is required to be given. Let p and q be related propositions, where p contains the premise(s) and q is a conclusion(s) of an argument form based on p. Then knowledge of p justifies a rational degree of partial belief of a in q.

A string theory for two dimensional Yang-Mills theory. Part I

Two dimensional gauge theories with charged matter fields are useful toy models for studying gauge theory dynamics, and in particular for studying the duality of large N gauge theories to perturbative string theories. A useful starting point for such studies is the pure Yang-Mills theory, which is exactly solvable. Its 1/N expansion was interpreted as a string theory by Gross and Taylor 30 years ago, but they did not provide a worldsheet action for this string theory, and such an action is useful for coupling it to matter fields. The chiral sector of the Yang-Mills theory can be written as a sum over holomorphic maps and has useful worldsheet descriptions, but the full theory includes more general extremal-area maps; a formal worldsheet action including all these maps in a “topological rigid string theory” was written by Hořava many years ago, but various subtleties arise when trying to use it for computations. In this paper we suggest a Polyakov-like generalization of Hořava’s worldsheet action which is well-defined, and we show how it reproduces the free limit of the Yang-Mills theory, both by formal arguments and by explicitly computing its partition function in several cases. In the future we plan to generalize this string theory to the finite-coupling gauge theory, and to analyze it with boundaries, corresponding either to Wilson loops or to dynamical matter fields in the fundamental representation.

History and philosophy of geography: Looking back and looking forward

This introduction to the special issue Reflections on Histories and Philosophies of Geography discusses the context and content of nineteen articles written to mark the fortieth anniversary of the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG). The group was founded in 1981, two years after the early career researchers who set up the group, Richard T. Harrison and David N. Livingstone, published jointly their first critical interventions in support of human geography's paradigmatic shift away from positivism, based on an early form of social constructivist argumentation. We argue that the subsequent proliferation of epistemic pluralism, which is discussed in the contributions to this special issue and has characterised the activities organised by the HPGRG, exemplifies the considerable value of three historiographical practices: first, engaging with the history and philosophy of geography collectively in one research group; second, situating methodologies within the history and philosophy of geography; and third, critically interrogating the discipline's evolving geographical knowledges, professional practices, and material cultures from different authorial positionalities.

Collapsed Modernities in the Twenty-First-Century Southern European Novel

ABSTRACT With a focus on a contemporary corpus of twenty-first-century Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek fiction that questions the peripheralization of these countries in European discourse, this essay aims to discuss Southern Europe as a literary space. Published around the 2008 financial crisis, these novels capture how the crisis’s onset precipitated the demise of a set of cultural, political, and institutional values previously taken for granted. Despite their national and local specificities, novels such as O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas (2002) by Lídia Jorge, Crematorio (2007) by Rafael Chirbes, Psomi, paideia, eleftheria (2012) by Petros Markaris, and I Chironi trilogy by Marcello Fois, critically reflect upon the long-standing realities of unequal development, historical hierarchies, and ambiguous positions within Europe, as well as upon deep-rooted orientalist perceptions of Europe’s South. A major trope cross-cuts these four novels: the so-called “economic miracles” of the second half of the twentieth century and their economic, political, cultural and environmental destructive drift as a major consequence of the accelerated modernization of late capitalism. Through our case studies, we develop our formal argument by exploring a crucial shared plot trigger: the death of a character as a metaphor for the ruins of a fading or collapsed modernity.

Optimization of rural environment through drainage system modernization: analysis of investment feasibility indicator in the modernization of drainage ditches on former agricultural lands

The benefits of installing pipes and drainage manholes, as well as covering open drainage ditches in built-up areas, have been listed in the report. A cost-effectiveness indicator for the investment, taking into account proprietary weighting coefficients, has been presented, which can be used as a formal argument determining the need for modernization of existing solutions in built-up areas. The indicator serves as an objective tool in the decision-making process at the municipal level. Modernization involving the installation of pipes and covering ditches, which previously served agricultural purposes, leads to an improvement in spatial order in a given area and also contributes to the protection of the natural environment through proper water management in former agricultural areas

Enhancing Students’ Numeracy Skills in Solving Probability Problems through Realistic Mathematics Education

Numeracy skills can help students to solve everyday problems. The low numeracy skills of students are caused by not understanding the problem, lack of strategy, and obstacles to evaluating and interpreting the solution to the context. The teacher needs to implement the learning process by using the RME approach, which uses local context and facilitates activity to think mathematically. This study aims to investigate the RME approach in enhancing numeracy skills and to describe the numeracy skills of students in solving problems according to numeracy indicators. The explanatory sequential mixed methods were used to analyze data from tests and interviews. The research subjects were 32 Grade 8 students, and four selected students chose to do the interviews based on each numeracy skills category. The results show a significant difference between the average numeracy skills of students before and after learning with the RME approach. Students with proficient, competent, and basic competencies fulfill the numeracy indicators. Meanwhile, students who need special intervention still have difficulty modeling problems into mathematical representations, incorrectly use the concept of probability, have inappropriate problem-solving strategies, and cannot interpret mathematical solutions in the form of arguments.

Online anti-immigrant discourse in Germany: ethnographically backed analysis of user comments

This article investigates discourse- and language-specific features of online anti-immigrant extreme speech in Germany. We analyze a context rich dataset collected and annotated through a collaborative effort involving fact-checkers, ethnographers and natural language processing (NLP) researchers. Using a bottom-up annotation scheme, we capture the nuances of the discourse and develop a typology of lexical innovations. The analysis combines thematic and critical discourse analysis with a linguistic perspective, revealing that direct forms of racism intertwine with argumentative forms of antagonism and playful word games within anti-immigrant discourses, in ways that center around narratives of victimhood and perceived threats from migrants. We further show how the specific conditions in Germany, including strict legal regulations of speech, have shaped the emergence of a non-standard language variety in and through anti-immigrant discourse, which helps the discourse community maintain group identity. The ethnographically backed analysis provides a granular understanding of the phenomenon of online extreme speech in the German context, contributing to the broader field of discourse studies and offering insights into the varieties within anti-immigrant discourse.

Empirical Foundation of Normative Arguments in Legal Reasoning

Empirical legal studies are often challenged by traditional doctrinal legal scholars as irrelevant to normative legal reasoning. This article explores, through the lens of jurisprudence and by drawing on dozens of empirical works, the junction between empirical facts and normative arguments. Both teleological and consequential arguments, in one of their premises, employ “difference-making facts” which identify the causal effects of certain legal measures as reasons for normative claims. Empirical works make causal inferences and their findings thus constitute an essential part of teleological and consequential arguments, which are prevalent in normative legal reasoning. All causal-identifying empirical findings can be framed as the required empirical premise in teleological and consequential arguments. Finally, although some classical canons of legal interpretation, such as textual and systemic arguments, appear not to take the form of teleological or consequential arguments, the use of these specific legal arguments must nonetheless be justified by teleological or consequential arguments at the meta-level. Thus, normative legal reasoning, one way or another, must have empirical foundations.

(r, Q) stock replenishment in multi-mode distribution systems with uncertain delivery channels and adaptive channel allocation

To mitigate the impact of uncertainty in goods distribution systems, multiple channels and transportation modes may be used. In this paper, a discrete-time model of supplier-depot interaction involving multiple channels of goods relocation is constructed using the concepts of dynamic systems theory. The considered class of systems faces two types of uncertainty: a priori unknown variations of market demand and unpredictable changes of lead-time delay, different for each channel. The variation pattern is arbitrary. As a control mechanism, the nonlinear (r, Q) replenishment policy (provide Q units of goods when the stock falls below r) is considered. As opposed to the previous studies, the policy is demonstrated robust to both sources of uncertainty acting simultaneously using a formal mathematical argument. Moreover, it is shown how to select the policy parameters to obtain full demand realization, thus eliminating backorders, irrespective of the pattern of delay and demand fluctuations. It is also discussed how to assign the depot capacity so that emergency storage will not be required even though deliveries from a few periods arrive concurrently, or out of order. In addition, a new channel allocation strategy, dynamically adapting itself to the channel temporal characteristics, is developed. As evidenced in the tests, the proposed adaptive strategy, by reducing the waiting time for the lot reassembly at the depot, allows for holding cost reduction by several percent with respect to a static strategy.

Improving Scientific Argumentation in University Students Through a Training Approach

The capacity to recognize formal arguments is crucial for clinical literacy. However, college students frequently lack a structural understanding of those arguments, in particular when the arguments are extra complicated. This study used an experimental method with a pre-post-check design. A follow-up of four weeks was used to research whether courses on figuring out the structural additives of casual arguments would enhance college students’ competence to recognize complicated arguments. The course was embedded in a constructivist mastering surroundings, and its content material was primarily based totally on Toulmin’s argument shape model, consistent with which arguments may be deconstructed into numerous purposeful additives: claims, datums, warrants, helping evidence, and rebuttals. Being capable of discovering warrants was primary to clinical literacy due to the fact warrants decide whether an end was justified primarily based totally on data. The effects display that schooling in argument shape typically no longer enhances overall recital for all college pupils and argument kinds, however, it’s miles beneficial for figuring out extra complicated arguments with much less specific systems and relational components among key additives (i.e. warrants). High-reaching college students gain maximum from this intervention, and it additionally enables college students with excessive pretest correctness scores. Our effects advocate that interferences to sell argumentation abilities need to be included in the curriculum, and those interventions need to be designed to shape the skill degree of learners. Keywords: Scientific Argumentation, University Students, Training Approach

Non-flat ABA Is an Instance of Bipolar Argumentation

Assumption-based Argumentation (ABA) is a well-known structured argumentation formalism, whereby arguments and attacks between them are drawn from rules, defeasible assumptions and their contraries. A common restriction imposed on ABA frameworks (ABAFs) is that they are flat, i.e. each of the defeasible assumptions can only be assumed, but not derived. While it is known that flat ABAFs can be translated into abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) as proposed by Dung, no translation exists from general, possibly non-flat ABAFs into any kind of abstract argumentation formalism. In this paper, we close this gap and show that bipolar AFs (BAFs) can instantiate general ABAFs. To this end we develop suitable, novel BAF semantics which borrow from the notion of deductive support. We investigate basic properties of our BAFs, including computational complexity, and prove the desired relation to ABAFs under several semantics.

Defeasible Normative Reasoning: A Proof-Theoretic Integration of Logical Argumentation

We present a novel computational approach to resolving conflicts among norms by nonmonotonic normative reasoning (in constrained I/O logics). Our approach extends standard sequent-based proof systems and makes them more adequate to nonmonotonic reasoning by adding to the sequents annotations that keep track of what is known about the defeasible status of the derived sequents. This makes transparent the reasons according to which norms should be applicable or inapplicable, and accordingly the sequents that make use of such norms are accepted or retracted. We also show that this proof theoretic method has tight links to the semantics of formal argumentation frameworks. The outcome of this paper is thus a threefold characterization result that relates, in the context of nonmonotonic normative reasoning, three traditional ingredients of AI-based reasoning methods: maximally consistent sets of premises (in constrained I/O logics), derived sequents (which are accepted in corresponding annotated sequent calculi), and logical arguments (that belong to the grounded extensions of the induced logical argumentation frameworks).