Correct Argument Research Articles

Sideways at the entrance of the cave: A pluralist footnote to Plato

The idea of a ‘true’ account of pluralism is ultimately contradictory. Liberal political philosophers often fell prey to a special version of this fallacy by presupposing that there might be only one correct argument for justifying the acceptance of pluralism as the core of a liberal democratic polity. Avoiding this trap, Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’ has offered a more sophisticated view of reasonable pluralism as linked with the ‘burdens of judgement’. His philosophical agenda, however, left some questions underexplored: What is the relation of pluralism to relativism? How can a conception of pluralism (epistemic, moral and political) avoid being either one view among others with no special claim to truth, or a foundationalist claim? If pluralism is a fact, in what sense can it bind us? These questions – crucial for grasping the distinctiveness of ‘political’ liberalism – are addressed by revisiting Plato’s simile of the cave, in order to make it accommodate the groundbreaking Rawlsian notion of the ‘reasonable’.

Toward an Epistemology of Art

An epistemology of art has seemed problematic mainly because of arguments claiming that an essential element of a theory of knowledge, truth, has no place in aesthetic contexts. For, if it is objectively true that something is beautiful, it seems to follow that the predicate “is beautiful” expresses a property – a view asserted by Plato but denied by Hume and Kant. But then, if the belief that something is beautiful is not objectively true, we cannot be said to know that something is beautiful and the path to an epistemology of art is effectively blocked. The article places the existence aesthetic properties in the proper context; presents a logically correct argument for the existence of such properties; identifies strategies for responding to this argument; explains why objections by Hume, Kant, and several other philosophers fail; and sketches a realization account of beauty influenced by Hogarth.

Language recovery in aphasia following implicit structural priming

Language recovery in aphasia following implicit structural priming

Concepts first, jargon second improves student articulation of understanding.

In this experiment, students in a large undergraduate biology course were first exposed to the concepts without new technical vocabulary ("jargon") in a pre-class reading assignment. Their learning of the concepts and jargon was compared with that of an equivalent group of students in another section of the same course, whose pre-class reading presented both the jargon and concepts together in the traditional manner. Both groups had the same active-learning classes with the same instructor, and then completed the same post-test. Although the two groups performed the same on the multiple choice questions of the post-test, the group exposed to concepts first and jargon second included 1.5 times and 2.5 times more correct arguments on two free-response questions about the concepts. The correct use of jargon between the two groups was similar, with the exception of one jargon term that the control group used more often. These results suggest that modest instructional changes whereby new concepts are introduced in a concepts-first, jargon-second manner can increase student learning, as demonstrated by their ability to articulate their understanding of new concepts.

Grammatical production deficits in PPA: Relating narrative and structured task performance

Grammatical production deficits in PPA: Relating narrative and structured task performance

Investigation of pretreatment sentence production impairments in individuals with aphasia: towards understanding the linguistic variables that impact generalisation in Verb Network Strengthening Treatment

Background: Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) is an aphasia treatment that aims to promote generalisation to sentence production in untrained contexts, including connected speech. VNeST’s fundamental premise is that verbs and their thematic roles are interrelated and as such can be strengthened by systematic retrieval of thematic roles related to trained verbs. In a recent group study, the hypothesised effects of VNeST were observed in a small group of people with aphasia who showed increased lexical retrieval within single words, sentence production, and discourse. However, variable patterns of improvement were observed across participants.Aims: The purpose of the current study was to conduct a theoretically based analysis of pretreatment language abilities for each participant from a previous group study in order to characterise patterns of impairment and improvement. Pretreatment profiles were compared against posttreatment outcomes to provide insight into potential mechanisms of improvement within participants and to determine whether there are common or different mechanisms of improvement across participants.Methods & Procedures: Pretreatment and posttreatment results of 11 people with aphasia who received 35 hr of VNeST across 10 weeks were analysed. As the basis of our analysis, we drew from evidence of dissociations in grammatical class abilities, theories of thematic role production, and empirical evidence of discrete thematic role subprocesses to evaluate each person’s pretreatment ability to (1) produce nouns and verbs in single words and sentences, (2) specify correct predicate argument structure for sentences, and (3) assign thematic roles within a syntactic frame.Outcomes & Results: Our results suggest that persons with different pretreatment linguistic impairment patterns can and do exhibit generalisation to untrained sentence and discourse contexts. The common mechanism of improvement to all participants was increased lexical retrieval. Participants with relatively strong pretreatment sentence construction abilities integrated increased lexical retrieval into already well-formed sentences, including complex sentences, while participants with weaker sentence construction abilities better integrated lexical retrieval into simpler sentences, which may have also benefited from strengthened predicate argument specification. Analyses of cases where optimal generalisation was not achieved revealed a number of root causes, including persistent pronoun production, light verb usage, sentence construction difficulties, and reduced self-monitoring.Conclusion: Overall, VNeST is a highly generalising treatment, and our findings are fairly generalisable to a range of aphasia types and severities with differing impairment patterns.

The 2010 World Cup High-Frequency Data Economics: Effects on International Awareness and (Self-Defeating) Tourism

Without a doubt, the 2010 World Cup of soccer in South Africa was a great experience for both soccer fans, who enjoyed a safe and efficiently-run tournament, and their South African hosts. The sporting and social spectacle was broadcast around the world and focused unprecedented media attention on South Africa. Despite the manifest success of the tournament, its short-term effects on international tourism, which are the nucleus of all other short-term positive effects on economic variables such as employment, income and taxes, have turned out to be of a much smaller magnitude than expected or even as reported during the tournament. This may be attributable to self-defeating prophecy effects. This study is a warning against the abuse of economic impact studies, especially those pertaining to major sporting events. It is also a call to use the “correct” arguments of measurable awareness effects and potential long-term development effects in discussing major sporting events. Methodologically, this study is innovative in its economic analysis of major sporting events because it (i) uses data from social networks and (ii) uses high-frequency daily data on tourism.

One reason, several logics

Humans have used arguments for defending or refuting statements long before the creation of logic as a specialized discipline. This can be interpreted as the fact that an intuitive notion of or a psychic disposition to articulate reasoning according to this pattern is present in common sense, and logic simply aims at describing and codifying the features of this spontaneous capacity of human reason. It is well known, however, that several arguments easily accepted by common sense are actually fallacies, and this indicates that logic is not just a descriptive, but also a prescriptive or normative enterprise, in which the notion of logical consequence is defined in a precise way and then certain rules are established in order to maintain the discourse in keeping with this notion. Yet in the justification of the correctness and adequacy of these rules commonsense reasoning must necessarily be used, and in such a way its foundational role is recognized. Moreover, it remains also true that several branches and forms of logic have been elaborated precisely in order to reflect the structural features of correct argument used in different fields of human reasoning and yet insufficiently mirrored by the most familiar logical formalisms.

Correction to “On Functional Duality in Multiuser Source and Channel Coding Problems Having One-Sided Collaboration” [Jul 06 2986-3002

In the above titled paper (ibid., vol. 52, no. 7, pp. 2986-3002, Jul. 06), there is an error on line 8 in the first paragraph on the left column on page 2992 regarding broadcast channels. The equation is not correct and thus the argument given in the rest of the paragraph is not valid. A correct argument is presented here.

A Generalizable Argument Structure Using Defeasible Class-inclusion Transitivity for Evaluating Evidentiary Probative Relevancy in Litigation

A new argument structure based on defeasible class-inclusion transitivity (DCIT) is proposed as a generalizable structure for evaluating probative relevancy determinations in litigation across typical evidentiary fact patterns. The general applicability for deductive inferences can be seen through the use of Sommers term-functor logic (TFL) principles to regiment premises into a DCIT structure. Its generalizability for inductive and presumptive (e.g. plausibilistic) inferences can be demonstrated by translating a variety of informal logic structures (e.g. Toulmin, argument schemes, Wigmorean charts and conventional box and arrow diagrams) into a DCIT argument structure.Aproper use of a DCIT structure demonstrates whether the item of evidence offered to be admitted in the trial and the ultimate probandum of the case (e.g. the defendant is guilty of murder) are linked within a single structurally correct argument. A DCIT perspective also provides a coherent metaphorical explanation of the concepts of probative force, probative weight, linked and convergent premises and inference.

Logical Consequence and Logical Expressions

...

Reply to David Kemmerer’s “A critique of Mark D. Allen’s ‘The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit’”

Allen [Allen, M. D. (2005). The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit. Brain and Language, 95, 255–264] presents evidence from a single patient, WBN, to motivate a theory of lexical processing and representation in which syntactic information may be encoded and retrieved independently of semantic information. In his critique, Kemmerer argues that because Allen depended entirely on preposition-based verb subcategory violations to test WBN’s knowledge of correct argument structure, his results, at best, address a “strawman” theory. This argument rests on the assumption that preposition subcategory options are superficial syntactic phenomena which are not represented by argument structure proper. We demonstrate that preposition subcategory is in fact treated as semantically determined argument structure in the theories that Allen evaluated, and thus far from irrelevant. In further discussion of grammatically relevant versus irrelevant semantic features, Kemmerer offers a review of his own studies. However, due to an important design shortcoming in these experiments, we remain unconvinced. Reemphasizing the fact the Allen (2005) never claimed to rule out all semantic contributions to syntax, we propose an improvement in Kemmerer’s approach that might provide more satisfactory evidence on the distinction between the kinds of relevant versus irrelevant features his studies have addressed.

Numerical investigations of anomalous diffusion effects in glasses

A coarse grained non-Markovian lattice model describing the mixed alkali effect (MAE) is presented. This feedback controlled diffusion model allows the qualitative and partially quantitative determination of the dependence on concentration, composition, temperature and frequency of the MAE. In the present contribution we demonstrate the first two properties by numerical investigations and we give some arguments for correctness of the last two statements.

Addendum to "On the L1-Condition Number of the Univariate Bernstein Basis"

The paper mentioned above is a contribution of the authors to Volume 18 (2002) of this journal, see (1). Recently, J. Domsta pointed out to us that the proof of Theorem 4.2 in that paper contains an error. The purpose of this addendum is to present a correct argument for it.

Why Kaplow and Shavell's 'Double-Distortion Argument' Articles Are Wrong

According to argument that economists denominate the Double-Distortion Argument, transaction-cost considerations aside, in otherwise-Pareto-perfect world, it will be less-economically-inefficient to redistribute income between earned-income classes by adjusting taxes on earned income than by sacrificing economic efficiency by adjusting liability-rules and damage-rules to make legal outcomes depend on the earned income of the defendant relative to the earned income of the plaintiff or by making the price individual has to pay for some government-provided good or service depend on the relationship between his earned income and average earned income in the society in question. The conclusion of this argument reflects the fact that, in otherwise Pareto-perfect world, both the type of legal-rule adjustment and the type of government-pricing policy in question (1) will distort the profitability of labor-leisure choices to the same extent that it would be distorted by the distributionally-equivalent tax policy and (2) will in addition distort the profitability of another kind of choice (for example, in the case of accident-law adjustment, potential-injurer and potential-victim avoidance-choices and, in the case of the government-pricing policy, potential-buyer purchasing choices). Kaplow and Shavell (KS) make two sets of claims that relate to this Double-Distortion Argument. The first is the following, highly-qualified pair of claims: if (1) one is trying to redistribute resources from the richer to the poorer or between or among classes that are defined by their members' (poorness) - put more negatively, one is trying to effectuate a redistribution that is not favored because it instantiates what KS refer to as an entitlement to payment based on desert, (2) one has the option of doing so to the extent desired through tax policy, (3) transaction-cost considerations can be ignored or do not favor the conclusion that the legal-rule adjustments needed to effectuate the desired redistribution will be more economically efficient than the tax policies needed to do so, and (4) other Pareto imperfections do not make the relevant legal-rule adjustments economically efficient (for example, by offsetting the extra distortion the relevant legal-rule adjustment generates), then it will always be (A) not only economically efficient but also morally desirable (B) for any public decisionmaker to reject choices that would redistribute income from the richer to the poorer by making liability and damages decisions depend on the defendant's richness relative to the plaintiff's in ways that would generate extra distortion even if it were desirable to redistribute income from the richer to the poorer. Kaplow and Shavell's second set of claims is that each of the four qualifications that their first set of claims contains can be ignored - i.e., is empirically insignificant. This article explains why each element of both sets of Kaplow and Shavell's claims is wrong. First, it argues that Kaplow and Shavell's highly-qualified set of claims is wrong because it assumes incorrectly that the greater economic efficiency of a choice guarantees its moral superiority and because it ignores the difference between the authorization of legislators and adjudicators. Then, it argues that even if Kaplow and Shavell's highly-qualified set of claims were correct, that fact would not justify their ultimate conclusion that no government decisionmaker should ever make a non-tax-policy decision that would sacrifice economic efficiency in otherwise-Pareto-perfect world for distributional purposes because none of the qualifications Kaplow and Shavell's qualified claims contain can in fact be ignored. More specifically, the article demonstrates that only one of Kaplow and Shavell's arguments to the contrary can bear scrutiny and that the only correct (though inchoate) argument they make for ignoring a qualification (an argument about the role of judges in our type of democracy) undermines their assertion that another qualification is unimportant.

Foundations of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century

1. INTRODUCTION AND EARLY DEVELOPMENTS. Logic and foundations are a domain of mathematics concerned with basic mathematical structures (in terms of which one can define all other mathematical structures), with the correctness and significance of mathematical reasoning, and with the effectiveness of mathematical computations. In the twentieth century, these areas have crystallized into three large chapters of mathematics: set theory, mathematical logic (including model theory), and computability theory, which are intertwined in significant ways. In this paper we describe the evolution and present state of each of them. In modern times the study of logic and foundations has attracted eminent mathematicians and philosophers such as Cantor, Cohen, Frege, Godel, Hilbert, Kleene, Martin, Russell, Solovay, Shelah, Skolem, Tarski, Turing, Zermelo, and others, and has given rise to a large body of knowledge. Although our paper is only a brief sketch of this development, we discuss essential results such as G6del's theorem on the completeness of first-order logic and his theorems on the incompleteness of most mathematical theories, some independence theorems in set theory, the role of axioms of existence of large cardinal numbers, Turing's work on computability, and some recent developments. There are still many interesting unsolved problems in logic and foundations. For example, logic does not explain what mathematics is. We know that mathematics has a very precise structure: axioms, definitions, theorems, proofs. Thus we know what is correct mathematics but not why the works of certain mathematicians delight us while others strike us as downright boring. Nor do foundations tell us how mathematicians construct proofs of their conjectures. Since we have no good theoretical model of the process for constructing proofs, we are far from having truly effective procedures for automatically proving theorems, although spectacular successes have been achieved in this area. We mention other unsolved problems at the end of this paper. We now give a brief sketch of the history of logic and foundations prior to 1900. The ancient Greeks asked: what are correct arguments? and: what are the real numbers? As partial answers they created the theory of syllogisms and a theory of commensurable and incommensurable magnitudes. These questions resurfaced in the 18th century, due to the development of analysis and to the lack of sufficiently clear concepts of sets, functions, continuity, convergence, etc. In a series of papers (1878-1897) Georg Cantor created set theory. In 1879 Gottlob Frege described a formal system of logic that explained precisely the logical structure of all mathematical proofs. In 1858 Richard Dedekind gave a definitive answer to the question: what are the real numbers? by defining them in terms of sets of rational numbers. He proved the axiom of continuity of the real line, an axiom accepted hitherto (beginning with the Greeks) without proof.

Two kinds of reasoning.

According to one view of reasoning, people can evaluate arguments in at least two qualitatively different ways: in terms of their deductive correctness and in terms of their inductive strength. According to a second view, assessments of both correctness and strength are a function of an argument's position on a single psychological continuum (e.g., subjective conditional probability). A deductively correct argument is one with the maximum value on this continuum; a strong argument is one with a high value. The present experiment tested these theories by asking participants to evaluate the same set of arguments for correctness and strength. The results produced an interaction between type of argument and instructions: In some conditions, participants judged one argument deductively correct more often than a second, but judged the second argument inductively strong more often than the first. This finding supports the view that people have distinct ways to evaluate arguments.

‘Graduateness’ and a core curriculum for geography?

Geography is an academic discipline, not a profession, and one of its traditional strengths in British higher education is its use as a vehicle for the development of critical intellectual skills. These require neither a core curriculum nor standard assessment procedures and ‘quality thresholds’. This feature should be defended against the short‐term materialist and politically correct arguments of programmes seeking to define ‘graduateness’ and core curricula.

TrainingWh-Question Production in Agrammatic Aphasia: Analysis of Argument and Adjunct Movement

The present research utilized aspects of the Principles and Parameters Approach (P&PA; Chomsky, 1991, 1993) in linguistic theory as well as findings from the psycholinguistic literature as a basis for examining sentence production in aphasic individuals. We examined the production of particularwh-movement constructions—wh-questions requiring movement of an argument noun phrase (i.e.,whoandwhatquestions) and those which require adjunct movement (i.e.,whenandwherequestions). Using a single-subject experimental treatment paradigm, subjects were sequentially trained to produce thesewh-questions and, throughout training, generalization to untrainedwh-questions relying on similarwh-movement processes was tested. As well, the influence of training on aspects of narrative and conversational discourse was examined. Seven agrammatic aphasic subjects who evinced difficulty producing (and comprehending) "complex" sentences (e.g., passives, object relative clauses,wh-questions)—sentences that involve movement of noun phrases (NPs) out of their canonical positions, leaving behind a "trace" of that movement or "gap"—participated in the study. Subjects were trained to producewh-questions by taking them through a series of steps emphasizing the lexical and syntactic properties (e.g., thematic role assignment, movement processes, and proper selection ofwh-morpheme) of declarative sentence counterparts of target sentences. Results revealed improved sentence production abilities in all subjects under study in both constrained sentence production and, importantly, in discourse tasks. The argument/adjunct distinction was observed in the sentence production recovery patterns noted in six of the seven subjects. Three of the subjects evinced correct argument movement across trained and untrained question structures whenwh-questions relying on argument movement were trained; similarly, for these subjects, training structures relying of adjunct movement resulted in improved adjunct movement. Three of the remaining four subjects who required additional treatment to alleviate theirwh-morpheme selection deficits, too showed covariance between argument and adjunct movement structures with each type of movement emerging across structures in temporal sequence. We discuss these data in terms of the operations necessary to producewh-questions, the importance of considering linguistic and psycholinguistic data when designing treatment programs for language disordered patients, and the contribution that detailed recovery data can make both to understanding the nature of sentence production deficits and to issues regarding normal sentence production.

TEACHING CALCULUS WITH A NUMERICAL EMPHASIS

ABSTRACT An organization for the beginning calculus course is suggested through which limits, treated as a background for numerical analysis, can be incorporated as a unifying theme for the course. Suggestions are given for organization and identification of first principles that can make making arguments for correctness the dynamic that drives the instruction.