Circular Arguments Research Articles

Miracles and Statistics: The Casual Assumption of Independence

Abstract The primary theme of this address is cautionary: Statistical independence is far too often assumed casually, without serious concern for how common is dependence and how difficult it can be to achieve independence (or related structures). After initial discussion of statistics and religion, the address turns to miracles, especially Hume's critique and Babbage's reply. Stress is given the often tacit or unexamined assumption of independence among witnesses of a putative miracle. Other contexts of multiple testimony are treated, and the address ends with contemporary casual assumptions of independence: nuclear reactor safety, repeated measurements, and so forth. Other topics include prayer, circularity of argument, and the tension between skepticism about testimony and the pragmatic need to accept most of it provisionally.

The Geologist's Vision

The methodology of geology incorporates an intuitive approach that rests in part upon a geologist's special way of seeing. Consideration of landscape painting helps illustrate how things are seen in general and sheds light on the geologist's vision in particular. For a rock to be seen as rock, its visual elements must permit the discernment of patterns that invoke a believable origin and history. At the same time, existing prejudices as to what constitute acceptable modes of origin and subsequent history place strict limits upon which patterns can be discerned. This circularity of argument is permissible because it is both inevitable and bears fruit. It may be decried that the historical bias of the geologist's vision reduces nature to mere symbols. However, emphasis within geology on the abstract is balanced by elements of geomorphology, which can provide both the professional and lay observers of landscape with enhanced comprehension and perception of the actual.

54] Identification and characterization of specific clones: Strategy for confirming the validity of presumptive clones

It should now be apparent that establishing the identity of a particular recombinant is not a simple procedure. In the absence of unambiguous and internally consistent DNA and protein sequence information, analyses become dependent on a series of characteristics which, together, may be unique to a specific gene and/or gene product. The process of identification is, thus, often more a corroboration of predicted characteristics than absolute proof. It is critical that the process of identification is not simply reduced to the circular arguments generated by reconfirming characteristics used during the initial selection scheme.

Cooperation and Control in Japanese Nursery Schools

permanent employment have been attributed to Japanese child rearing. Yet, there is remarkably little English-language evidence on early socialization in Japan. This article provides observational data from 15 Japanese nursery schools. It is not my intention here to draw generalizations about Japanese nursery schools or to demonstrate differences between Japanese and American schools. The substantial variability in nursery schools within each country makes such systematic comparison an ambitious undertaking. Rather, the behavioral and ethnopsychological data of the present paper are intended to identify potentially interesting areas for future research on nursery school socialization and to stimulate American thinking about two aspects of early education: school practices which influence the development of cooperative behavior in children and adult strategies for controlling children's behavior.

Circular Arguments and Self-Fulfilling Definitions: “Statelessness” and the Dagaaba

Since the publication of Maine'sAncient Lawin 1861 social anthropological studies have been prolific. The basic intellectual and investigative interest of these social anthropologists was and continues to be the social, political, and cultural organization of preliterate societies in theirbenignstate of primitivity. Indeed, it might be said that the anthropologist created the savage, the barbarian, and the primitive and their state as an object of intellectual inquiry through fieldwork. Most of these studies conducted within the framework of what Owusu calls “structual-functional empiricism” were not exactly law-centered. Whatever glimpses of the legal system one could obtain was by accident. Law was merely part of a functioning, coherent, and consistent totality; part of the jigsaw puzzle of the primitive reality.Subsequent legal anthropological works clearly fell into two categories: those that thought that primitive societies did not have law and others that thought that they did. Those of the first group have viewed small-scale societies from the monocles of western jurisprudence, expecting to find a system of rules emanating from an authoritative source in a hierarchically-organized political system with government, courts, and a law-enforcement mechanism backed by coercive physical sanctions. Viewed from this perspective they not surprisingly found what they considered to be a pattern of “statelessness,” lawlessness, anarchy, and notions of justice and remedy based upon the principle of self-help or the law of the claw and the fang. Critics of colonialism and anthropology suggest that this characterization of the expectations of the colonial anthropologist might be a serious misrepresentation of their true expectations. The colonialist needed the anthropologist to provide the methods by which colonialism could be most effective. The anthropologist on the other hand created the savage and his state of statelessness, lawlessness, and self-help to provide a rational basis for colonialist subjugation and exploitation of the savage.

A Transinstitutional Nonvoluntary Modelling Theory of Art

in terms of some single necessary and sufficient condition that art and only art will satisfy have certainly succumbed to the fatal pincer: it is simply not credible that all works of art are imitative (or revelatory or expressive or therapeutic or beautiful, etc.), and that only works of art are imitative (or revelatory or expressive or therapeutic or beautiful, etc.). Something can be done on behalf of the 'essences' by an ingenious qualification of terms so that words like 'imitation' and 'revelation' gain extremely technical senses distant from ordinary usage. Even so, while one side of the pincer ('all works of art are ...') may thus be resisted, the other ('and only works of art are...) is usually avoided by recourse to an illicit circularity of argument in which the modified essence (imitation, revelation, etc.) is implicitly and covertly defined as being of a sort peculiar to works of art. Of the more recent, roughly post-Wittgensteinean, accounts of art emphasizing the 'openness' or 'opentexturedness' or 'essential contestedness' of the concept, three related versions have shown some plausibility. The 'paradigm case' account did not fail decisively in the museums and galleries until after the mid-century, when disputable candidate objects presented themselves (for example) as suitcases full of rotting cheese on the floor, or as specifications for a hole in the ground. The 'ordinary language' account of art survived reasonably well until ordinary language-users ceased to be able reliably to pick out recent works of art from the jumble of assorted goods in the warehouse.

Analysis of the preservation of community structure in assemblages of fossil mammals

The degree to which the relative abundances of the species in a fossil assemblage represent those in the living community from which it came is an indication of the fidelity of the assemblage in preserving most of the aspects of community structure that we may hope to find in the fossil record. I have developed a model for the formation of attritional fossil mammal assemblages that shows that the logarithm of the number of individuals of each species in an ideal unbiased assemblage, when regressed on the logarithm of body mass, will exhibit a slope of approximately −1.05 ± 0.25 (approximate 95% confidence interval). This value is based upon ubiquitous scaling relationships of population density and turnover rate with body mass among extant mammals. These relationships are the results of widespread energetic and metabolic regularities in community structure and physiology and can be expected to have been essentially the same in the remote past. The slope of −1.05 provides for the first time a reference standard for community structure of sufficient generality for use in the analysis of this aspect of fossil assemblages. We can use this value as a sort of “null hypothesis” of no bias against which we can compare actual fossil assemblages.Analysis of some promising assemblages reveals that they exhibit badly biased relative abundances. However, it is likely that in these cases we can explain this bias as almost entirely the result of pre-burial differential destruction of the carcasses of different-sized species.The combination of this new, biological approach with the largely physical approaches of taphonomy and sedimentology will allow us to ask more specific questions about bias in fossil assemblages, avoiding circular arguments. We can now distinguish, in a large number of situations, assemblages that preserve reliable community-structure information from those that do not.

Circular demonstration and von Wright-Geach entailment.

Students of the literature on entailment [7], [1] are familiar with the von Wright-Geach definition of entailment [6], [2]: p entails q if, and only if, by means of logic, 1 it is possible to come to know the truth of •/> D cp without coming to know the falsehood of p or the truth of q. A competitor of the Lewis account of entailment as strict implication, the von Wright-Geach definition has enjoyed little success. Perhaps one reason is that the definition is essentially epistemic, and entailment is not widely thought to be an epistemic notion.2 The notion of entailment aside, however, the von Wright-Geach notion does intriguingly seem to be applicable to one interesting epistemic concept of obvious logical interest. In this article,* we suggest that the von Wright-Geach definiens, in effect, partially defines the concept of a non-circular demonstration, and we argue that the von Wright-Geach definiens can be extended in a natural way to yield a full definition for non-circular demonstration. Thus we think of the latter notion in a frankly epistemic way. We have argued in [8] and [9] that circularity of argument (petitio principii) is best thought of as an epistemic matter, and for those who agree with us on this point it may not seem too surprising that there is a connection between circularity and von Wright-Geach entailment. For those who disagree with our thesis that petitio is essentially epistemic, we hope that establishing the connection in question may serve to diminish the disagreement. In either case, we think that this new application of the von Wright-Geach framework is interesting in its own right. In [9] we argued that the history of the subject, which has largely followed in the tradition set by Aristotle in various remarks in the Topics, De Sophisticis Elenchis, and the Rhetoric? suggests the wisdom of

Rhodian Readings

My main purpose in this article is to present a corpus of graffiti and dipinti on pots found on Rhodes dating down to the end of the fifth century B.C. About one hundred such inscriptions have been overlooked in previous publications or remain unpublished. I discuss the problems of interpreting these short graffiti and the commercial aspects of some of them. In so doing I comment on certain aspects of the alphabet in use on the island, but I have to deal with the complicating factor, whether or not the several marks were inscribed by a Rhodian or, for instance, by an outside trader. I hope to avoid circularity of argument (‘this letter is not Rhodian, therefore the inscriber was a foreigner’ or ‘this inscription should have been cut on Rhodes, therefore the lettering must be Rhodian’) by the application of various independent criteria which I outline below.