Sort Of Argument Research Articles

Scepticism, evidential holism and the logic of demonic deception

AbstractSceptical arguments in epistemology typically employ sceptical hypotheses, which are rivals to our everyday beliefs so constructed that they fit exactly the evidence on which those beliefs are based. There are two ways of using a sceptical hypothesis to undermine an everyday belief, giving rise to two distinct sorts of sceptical argument: underdetermination‐based and closure‐based. However, both sorts of argument, as usually formulated in the literature, fall foul of evidential holism, for they ignore the crucial role of background beliefs. An analogy with the philosophy of science makes this point explicit. There is no simple way to “holism proof” the two sceptical arguments.

NDAs: A Study in Rights, Wrongs, and Civil Recourse

Abstract According to John Goldberg and Ben Zipursky (“Goldursky”), there are two central pillars to tort law, pillars that are best explicated by civil recourse theory. Torts are legally recognized wrongs, and the power to seek redress is part of the Lockean bargain. Using the recent question of whether nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) should be permitted, this Article unearths an instability in the kind of normativity upon which Goldursky relies. Specifically, this paper explores how the unenforceability or bans on NDAs premised upon third party harms may presuppose the victim has a duty to rescue these third parties. I begin by revealing the underlying moral relationship at the heart of these potential duties. From there, I explore how these sorts of arguments cannot easily be voiced within the presuppositions of civil recourse theory. Finally, I consider the pressure points within civil recourse theory that could potentially take on board these moral considerations. My bottom line is simple: Whichever way one thinks about NDAs and the duty to rescue, a dilemma is created for Goldursky. There is simply a mismatch between the kind of arguments that one can make about why it would be (in)appropriate to limit the plaintiff’s cause of action and what the underlying content of tort law should be. Ultimately, the kind of normativity that they need to understand the Lockean bargain, as well as the content of and caveats thereto, may require more bite than positive morality.

Bias towards the future

AbstractAll else being equal, most of us typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future rather than the past and negative experiences in the past rather than the future. Recent empirical evidence tends not only to support the idea that people have these preferences, but further, that people tend to prefer more painful experiences in their past rather than fewer in their future (and mutatis mutandis for pleasant experiences). Are such preferences rationally permissible, or are they, as time‐neutralists contend, rationally impermissible? And what is it that grounds their having the normative status that they do have? We consider two sorts of arguments regarding the normative status of future‐biased preferences. The first appeals to the supposed arbitrariness of these preferences, and the second appeals to their upshot. We evaluate these arguments in light of the recent empirical research on future‐bias.

Interpreting Russell’s Paralysis

Interpreting Russell’s Paralysis Graham P. Stevens James R. Connelly. Wittgenstein’s Critique of Russell’s Multiple Relation Theory of Judgement. London and New York: Anthem P., 2021. Pp. xiv, 206. (Hb) isbn-13: 978-1-78527-740-5, us$125; (ebook) 978-1-78527-741-2, us$40. In 1913 Russell reportedly told Wittgenstein that he was “paralyzed” by Wittgenstein’s objection to the multiple relation theory of judgment at the heart of the book he was writing. Russell abandoned the manuscript, which was only published after his death. However, no clear record of the objection, fully stated, has survived. Unsurprisingly, therefore, there are a lot of competing interpretations of Russell’s paralysis. Given the amount of coverage it has received, a book-length study of the issue is maybe not a hard thing to produce. A good book-length study which does justice to all of these competing theories through a careful analysis of them while also carving out space for a new contribution to that field is far harder to achieve. James Connelly has achieved that here. The multiple relation theory of judgment (mrtj) was intended to eliminate Russell’s ontology of propositions by replacing them with judgment complexes. Ontologically speaking, judgments are not self-subsisting entities but formations out of constituents that are the true members of Russell’s ontology. The proposition that Desdemona loves Cassio does not exist as a unified complex, but Desdemona, Cassio and the relation expressed by the verb “loves” do. Othello’s belief unites these entities through an act of judgment. Wittgenstein’s objection is commonly thought to be directed at demonstrating that judgment (at least as construed by Russell) is not a suitable relation for securing something that meets the demands we have of propositional content. The starting place for the competing interpretations is the ingenious account offered by Stephen Sommerville and Nicholas Griffin. What made their interpretation such an improvement on earlier proposals is that they were the first to really take seriously Russell’s dramatic response. Previous interpretations had provided compelling accounts of how Wittgenstein’s objection fitted into [End Page 181] his wider philosophical project in the Tractatus, but gave no explanation for why Russell should be particularly troubled by it. Sommerville–Griffin argued that the objection exposes a fundamental incompatibility between the mrtj and the ramified type theory of Principia Mathematica. Given that the mrtj was intended to play a key role in the same work, this interpretation gives a very good explanation for the impact of the objection on Russell if he was persuaded by it. Connelly recognizes the influence of the Sommerville–Griffin interpretation, labelling it “sr” (standard reading) and situating subsequent interpretations in comparison to it, including his own. The alternative accounts include my own, as well as those of Peter Hanks, Christopher Pincock, Gregory Landini, Samuel Lebens and Fraser MacBride, and other interpretations are often considered alongside these main targets of the book. An inevitable criticism one might be tempted raise at this point is that several other interpretations are excluded, at least from detailed scrutiny, although it is hard to see how any book on this topic could avoid that without becoming intolerably long. Connelly’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s objection divides it into three “waves”: (1) a general complaint that the Theory of Knowledge manuscript was mistakenly prioritizing epistemology over logic in trying to solve foundational questions; (2) the specific attack on the structure of judgments in the mrtj; (3) the appeal to logical forms in the theory. Really, (1) is something of a scene-setting device. As an objection it would be flimsy, as it just amounts to an opinion of Wittgenstein’s, not any sort of argument. But what makes it significant, Connelly suggests, is that Russell shared the same view, hence the force of the concern in his mind. While I agree with Connelly up to a point here, and he certainly provides evidence for the claim, I don’t think this issue can really point to an explanation of Russell’s paralysis. For one thing, the terms “logic” and “theory of knowledge” are being used in quite an antiquated sense by Russell and Wittgenstein: much...

Content externalism without thought experiments?

Abstract A recent argument against content internalism bucks tradition: it abandons Twin-Earth-style thought experiments and instead claims that internalism is inconsistent with plausible principles relating belief contents and truth values. Call this (for reasons that will become obvious) the transparency argument. Here, it is shown that there is a structurally parallel argument against content internalism’s foil: content externalism. Preserving the transparency argument while fending off the parallel argument against externalism requires that (i) content-determination and truth-value-determination are implausibly linked together and that (ii) eternalism about belief contents is true. Given these requirements, there may be reason to prefer simple, thought-experiment-based arguments against internalism – the sort of arguments that the transparency argument is meant to supersede.

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Can the Demands of Justice Always Be Reconciled with the Demands of Epistemology? Testimonial Injustice and the Prospects of a Normative Clash

ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that there are possible cases in which the demands of justice and the norms of epistemology cannot be simultaneously satisfied. I will bring out these normative clashes in terms of the now-familiar phenomenon of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007). While the resulting argument is very much in the spirit of two other sorts of argument that have received sustained attention recently – arguments alleging epistemic partiality in friendship, and arguments that motivate the hypothesis of moral encroachment on the epistemic – I suggest how the argument from epistemic injustice differs from, and is stronger than, both of those arguments. The implications of the present argument are several: we must (i) reconceive the role of identity-prejudice in testimonial injustice, (ii) modify the way we think about how justice and epistemology bear on testimonial transactions, and (iii) understand the mutuality of speech exchanges in ways that do not privilege any particular participant’s epistemic perspective.

'Venegzit' - Venecijanski secesionistički pokret

The research analyses the Veneto's secessionist movement. Focus of the research is on 2014 plebiscite. As a wider theoretical framework for research we will use the theory of the social contract as the mainstream approach in contemporary political philosophy, with huge relevance for our understanding of the political community. According to this theoretical model, secession is legally possible only-and-only-if there is a consent or consensus from all sides within political community. Usually (in political practice), this means that there is some kind of agreement between secessionists and the central government. Other sorts of arguments (economic, cultural, and historical) cannot provide a sufficient justification for secession. Mandatory reason for secession is the consent of others. Other reasons are not sufficient, but these reasons are non-mandatory also. Secession is possible by the consent of others, even without any other reason except request of secessionists to leave their present state. Discussion about Veneto case from 2014 was a typical example of this theoretical approach. Requests from the cultural, economical and historical facts were correct (often and in many cases), and has been possible to defend these arguments in correct scholarly debate and analysis. Nevertheless, absence of consent of the government in Rome, prevents any legal consequences for changing the status of Veneto. .

Does a Delayed Origin for Biological Life Count as Evidence Against the Existence of God?

Many theists have argued that contemporary physics provides evidence for the existence of God, insofar as the fundamental laws of nature display evidence of having been fine-tuned to allow for the emergence of biological life. (See, e.g., the works of Stephen Barr, Robin Collins, Paul Davies, John Leslie, Richard Swinburne, etc.) But some have objected that this evidence needs to be weighed against the conflicting evidence that biological life is a relatively late phenomenon in the universe. For if God really wanted the universe to contain life (esp. intelligent life), such that He specifically designed its laws with this in mind, why would He have set things up in such a way that it took billions of years for life to appear? One can employ this general concern to formulate an argument against intelligent design. In this paper I critically evaluate some existing theistic solutions to this sort of argument, and also propose several new lines of reply.

Narrar através de imagens: a representação da Batalha do Somme por Joe Sacco

Às vésperas do centenário da Primeira Guerra Mundial, o quadrinista Joe Sacco publicou The Great War. July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme, um panorama ilustrado com cerca de sete metros de comprimento, sem falas ou texto. Neste artigo, será discutido como a escolha do primeiro dia da Batalha do Somme como evento representativo da guerra, a perspectiva de apenas um dos lados (o britânico), e a apresentação do exército como “um único organismo” funcionam como argumentação nessa representação imagética da guerra. Também serão feitas considerações sobre o livreto que acompanha o panorama, e onde se encontram as notas de Sacco que funcionam como legendas informativas, junto a um texto do jornalista Adam Hochshild que narra o desenvolvimento dos acontecimentosdo dia.

Existence as a Property

This paper is a defense of the view that existence is a property. Since the view is still a minority one, a fair amount of space is allotted to defending it against objections and counter-arguments. Positive arguments aren’t lacking, however, and emerge in the course of the discussion. Not all of the many positive or negative arguments which follow are wholly original—a fact to be expected in this context—but a fair number are, and both sorts of argument are seamlessly interwoven in the warp and woof of what follows.

Ethics and Evolutionary Theory

It has long been argued that sometimes, acquiring information about the origins of one’s beliefs removes or diminishes the justification for those beliefs that one would otherwise have had. Descartes, for example, claimed that the less powerful the Author of his nature, the more reason he had to doubt his own beliefs (1960 [1641]: 79). And the more specific worry that knowledge of our evolutionary origins might give us reason to doubt our own beliefs famously goes back as far as Darwin himself, who remarked in an 1881 letter that ‘with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’1 In contemporary analytic philosophy, two sorts of arguments that might reasonably be regarded as descendants of Darwin’s doubt have attracted a lot of attention. The first of these is Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN), which first appeared in the early 1990s (see Plantinga 1993, 2000, 2011). That argument is intended to show that anyone who accepts both atheism and the claim that human beings are products of evolutionary processes has grounds to doubt the reliability of all of her cognitive faculties and hence has grounds to doubt all of her beliefs. Plantinga advanced this argument as part of a critique of contemporary naturalism; it attracted a lot of attention among philosophers interested in the contemporary debate between Christian theism and naturalism. Around or shortly after the time that philosophical discussion of Plantinga’s argument had waned, there was an explosion of interest in arguments concerned specifically with normative beliefs or with some specific subset thereof. That explosion was triggered by the 2006 publication of Sharon Street’s ‘A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value’ and Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality. Street and Joyce both argue that recognition of the evolutionary influences on our moral beliefs construed in a certain way gives us reason to doubt those beliefs and hence removes (or at least significantly diminishes) whatever justification those beliefs would have otherwise had. Although Plantinga advanced his EAAN as part of a defence of Christian theism over contemporary naturalism, Street and Joyce advance their arguments in support of specific metaethical positions. Street argues that her Darwinian dilemma makes trouble for any realist metaethical view according to which moral beliefs are true just in case they correspond with attitude-independent moral truths. She further argues that a version of constructivism according to which moral truths are functions of certain human attitudes is not susceptible to the Darwinian dilemma. Her argument, then, is advanced in support of constructivism over realism in metaethics. Joyce, by contrast, advances his argument in defence of a certain sort of moral error theory.2 His contention is that if there are moral truths at all, then there are attitude-independent moral truths but that recognizing the evolutionary origins of our concept of moral obligation gives us grounds for doubting that we ever apply that concept correctly and hence any justification our moral beliefs may have had is undermined.3 In this article, I provide an overview of the contemporary discussion of ‘evolutionary debunking arguments’ (hereinafter ‘EDAs’) that was triggered by the work of Street and Joyce. My main aims are to provide rough characterizations of the EDAs of Street and Joyce, indicate some of the various ways that these EDAs have been understood by commentators together with the most prominent lines of criticism of these EDAs, examine one particularly interesting off-shoot of Street’s EDA and identify some interesting areas for future research.

The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters by James McPherson

Reviewed by: The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters by James McPherson J. Matthew Gallman The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters, James McPherson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. ISBN 978-01-9932-5776, 232pp., cloth, $27.95. In 1989 James McPherson’s grand narrative, Battle Cry of Freedom, won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to be a best-seller, shaping how a generation understood the Civil War. Before he became the “Pulitzer Prize–winning historian of the American Civil War,” McPherson had written three important volumes on abolitionism and African American history. In the last quarter century, McPherson has published— among other things—books on soldiers’ motivations, Abraham Lincoln, the battle of Antietam, Jefferson Davis, and naval warfare during the Civil War. I mention these volumes because despite their collective weight a case can be made that McPherson has been as skilled an essayist as he has been an author of big books. The short form, if done well, calls for concise prose, clear arguments, and the willingness to make a big statement in few words. The essayist must also understand his audience. Different readers require different levels of detail and different sorts of arguments. James McPherson writing a short essay is like Willie Mays closing in on a long fly ball: it does not look that hard at all. At least until you try it yourself. The War That Forged a Nation collects a dozen essays, only one of which is new for this volume. Half are reprinted from various journals or collections. The remaining five are reworked review essays that originally appeared in the New York Review of Books. Taken together, the collection demonstrates McPherson’s skills as a versatile author and it illustrates many of the big arguments that he has made about the Civil War era throughout his career. Even the most engaged Civil War historian will find unfamiliar essays here, although perhaps no surprising new discoveries. General readers will learn a huge amount. Budding authors should read for the art of writing. Ten of the essays focus on the war years. One—among the strongest pieces in the volume—considers antebellum politics and the War with Mexico; the final essay looks beyond the Civil War, arguing that the violence of the Civil War continued well into the postwar years. The review essays are nice examples of short essays written for one occasion and then reworked for a new purpose. In some cases, the books become the context [End Page 329] for an interpretive piece that no longer “reviews” the books at all. In a few cases, McPherson takes on an author and interpretation head on. One of the best essays wrestles with the notion of “just war” and includes some harsh criticism of the work of religious historian Harry Stout. Another returns to the popular debate about “Who Freed the Slaves?” laying out a moderate position that insists on the primacy of the Union army while acknowledging the important agency of individual slaves. In an excellent essay on Total War and the conflict’s essential destructiveness, McPherson argues that historian Mark Neely overstated the extent of restraint exercised by the warring armies, but he also dissents from those scholars who see the conflict’s overwhelming death and destruction as its key legacy. Two essays build on McPherson’s recent excursion into naval history. One compares the careers of David Farragut and Samuel DuPont. McPherson finds that DuPont’s cautious, self-involved nature resonates with the unfortunate history of George McClellan; while the aggressive Farragut reminds him of the military mind of Ulysses S. Grant. The other naval essay turns to diplomatic history, exploring how a series of naval conflicts opened up the possibility—never realized—that foreign powers might enter the War between the States. These essays illustrate a fundamental truth: as a scholar of the Civil War era, James McPherson has highly informed opinions about a wealth of seemingly distinct subdisciplines, including religious history and ethics, military history at all levels, political history, diplomatic history, and African American history. He is equally comfortable discussing causality and morality, in examining short-term...

Religious Truth and Secular Scandal

In the editorial accompanying the 2005 publication of satirical cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, the culture editor of Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose, offered a preemptive defense of the satire along political lines: Modern, secular [sekulaere] society is rejected by some Muslims. They lay claim to a special position, when they insist on special consideration of their own religious feelings. It is incompatible with secular [verdsligt] democracy and freedom of speech, where one must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule.1 In the controversy that followed the cartoons' publication, scholarly and media observers alike followed Rose's cue in identifying the two sides of the conflict: on the one hand, a secular and democratic culture that prizes the freedom of speech, and on the other a religious and autocratic culture that shields certain religious representations from criticism. This impression deepened as many Muslims across the world took to protest the publication, using language and making gestures that seemed from the standpoint of many Europeans and Americans to be surprisingly or inappropriately violent.2 In Western reporting, the controversy was often transposed in a liberal language of conflicting rights: the to express oneself freely versus the not to be offended.3 But what sort of argument would prioritize the to avoid criticism over the freedom to criticize? Formulated in this way, the conflict can appear trivial and one-sided: those who protest religious satire simply fail to understand the nature of democratic political culture. And as opposition to the cartoons became the pretext for extreme acts of violence across the globe, the one-sidedness of this right appeared even more dramatic.4Facing the prospect of an increasingly entrenched debate, a number of scholars have suggested an oblique approach, questioning the neutrality of secular freedoms, highlighting the tensions that develop between political ideals such as the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion when they are applied to a highly diverse society.5 Freedom, they rightly remind us, is always accessed in culturally encoded ways. And depending on how it is formulated and on the kinds of exceptions afforded in its provision, a as apparently neutral as the freedom of expression can actually intensify social and political inequality, placing greater affective demands on some communities than on others.6 Such inequalities become particularly salient when we consider the culturally specific meanings attached to different forms of representation. Visual representations do not have the same status in Islam as they do in Christianity. Likewise, a secular liberal is likely to interpret the concept of blasphemy within an entirely different epistemological and affective framework than a passionate religious believer.7I would like to consider another aspect of this conflict. My concern here is not about the coherence of the freedom of speech in a situation of religious pluralism or the legitimacy of apparently universal political ideals. Rather, I would like us to think about the cultural underpinnings of Rose's claim that a secular society requires a certain tolerance to insult and ridicule. In attempting to understand the European side of the conflict over the cartoons, many have pointed to the culture of criticism that emerged over the long course of European Enlightenment and Reformation.8 A taste for unmasking religious power is surely one of the more enduring legacies of the esprit critique advanced by philosophes such as Bayle and Voltaire. At the same time, to appreciate the Enlightenment roots of contemporary attitudes toward criticism and offense ought not to dissuade us from pursuing more local avenues of inquiry. In what follows, I will examine an important Danish account of the relation between religious piety and offense, found in Soren Kierkegaard's ascetic masterpiece, Training in Christianity. …

Phenomenal consciousness, representational content and cognitive access: a missing link between two debates

Two debates loom large in current discussions on phenomenal consciousness. One debate concerns the relation between phenomenal character and representational content. Representationalism affirms, whereas “content separatism” denies, that phenomenal character is exhausted by representational content. Another debate concerns the relation between phenomenal consciousness and cognitive access. “Access separatism” affirms, whereas, e.g., the global workspace model denies, that there are phenomenally conscious states that are not cognitively accessed. I will argue that the two separatist views are related. Access separatism supports content separatism by undermining the most prominent sort of arguments in favor of representationalism, namely ones that appeal to the phenomenology of perceptual experiences.

Review: The Psychophysical Ear: Music Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 by Alexandra Hui; Helmholtz and the Modern Listener by Benjamin Steege

The Psychophysical Ear: Music Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 , by Alexandra Hui. Transformations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. xxii, 233 pp. Helmholtz and the Modern Listener , by Benjamin Steege. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii, 282 pp. Let us imagine an aesthetics of music grounded in the notion of compression . Audio file-compression locates the point at which the granularity of the signal is of sufficient density to recreate sound, to give the illusion of an original indistinguishable from that of a higher-resolution reproduction. We might stipulate that the efficiency of perception is an aesthetic desideratum: the beautiful or well-formed is that which transmits musical information without waste, locates a “sweet spot” in the density of information. The flattened dynamics of commercial music could be said to be well formed, locating the ideal point in the dynamic range or the place of maximum efficiency. Should we be catholic in our definition of music, we could assert that the clarity of the cinematic soundscape (wherein everything is completely audible) is likewise efficient or ideal. From this a corollary: sound designed or rendered is to be preferred to “natural” sound. By extension, we might imagine a sociology, one wherein the beautiful is that which is coded by timbre or genre or the like so as to allow internal soundscapes to be optimized ; or to allow even for an optimized listening, one locating an ideal point between attention and disattention. What is interesting here is not the exercise itself (admittedly facile) but the almost automatic rejoinders it provokes. Rejoinders epistemological: Would not neuroscience, perhaps, provide a more solid ground for an aesthetics, one whose development rested less on suggestion and more on things empirical, testable? Rejoinders moral: Would not an aesthetics grounded in efficiency sacrifice a richness of experience? Is there not something important captured by lossless encoding, or vinyl? Rejoinders ethical or disciplinary: Given that the desideratum of such a theory would be a set of covering laws governing music, could the end result be anything but mechanistic, …

Deliberation and Civic Studies

Deliberation and Civic Studies

Cyberspace and the State Action Debate: The Cultural Value of Applying Constitutional Norms to 'Private' Regulation

Regulation in cyberspace does not consist only of laws issued and enforced by sovereigns. Instead, parties and standard-setting bodies, employing the technology of online interaction, will increasingly be able to regulate activity, which might potentially upset many of the provisional balances we as a society have struck in areas such as free speech, privacy, and intellectual property. The question then becomes: how do we evaluate this regulation? Are constitutional norms applicable? Answering such questions requires a reinvestigation of legal doctrine and theory concerning the distinction between (which is generally subject to constitutional constraints) and private ordering (which is not). Critics have repeatedly argued that this distinction is incoherent, but courts nevertheless have shown no inclination to rethink the state action doctrine. In addition, most Americans are likely to resist, on an intuitive level, scholarly attempts to erode the distinction between public and private. Therefore, it may be that a different sort of argument is necessary. This article offers one such argument, based on what I call constitutionalism. Instead of repeatedly claiming that seemingly activity is actually public, we could instead focus on the cultural benefits we might derive from using the Constitution to debate fundamental societal values, public or private. Constitutional adjudication can foster constructive societal debate about social and political issues. It can permit courts to perform an educative function by articulating values and constructing narratives that help constitute our national identity. And, constitutional adjudication can create opportunities for courts to operate as deliberative fora in which difficult political issues are addressed. For all of these reasons, we may decide that measuring a broader range of activities against constitutional norms carries significant cultural benefits. Of course, such an argument does not necessarily outweigh the reasons for viewing the scope of the Constitution more narrowly. Nevertheless, before we can truly analyze the costs and benefits of the state action doctrine, we must consider the constitutive cultural value of constitutional adjudication. Such consideration may be particularly important in the context of debating online regulation, because in cyberspace it is perhaps easier to see how entities can threaten cherished constitutional norms.

The pentad of cruft: A taxonomy of rhetoric used by Wikipedia editors based on the dramatism of Kenneth Burke

It is widely understood that negotiation and debate among editors is key to the Wikipedia’s system of governance. However, the role of rhetoric, the construction and application of argument, in this process is less well understood. In this paper, I attempt to move our understanding of the role of rhetoric on Wikipedia forward by proposing a taxonomy of rhetoric derived from Kenneth Burke’s dramatism. The proposed taxonomy will classify arguments first by the dominant ratio of elements from Burke’s pentad present in the argument (scene–act, act–agent, etc.), then by the vocabulary employed to make the argument (what Burke called the terministic screen), then by the scope of terms used. I then demonstrate how this taxonomy might be developed to describe the rhetoric of the Wikipedia community by employing it to classify a sample of arguments drawn from Wikipedia’s Articles for Deletion (AfD) process. Further development and application of the taxonomy proposed here could help us refine our understanding of how and why Wikipedia editors develop and deploy certain arguments, and which sorts of arguments have the most success in swaying Wikipedian debates.

Two skeptical arguments or only one?

The first step in responding to the challenge of external world skepticism is to get clear on the structure of the skeptic’s argument. The most prominent varieties of skeptical arguments either rely on closure principles or underdetermination principles. The relationship between these two sorts of arguments is contentious. Some argue that these arguments can independently motivate skepticism. Others argue that they are really equivalent. I argue that although these two arguments are distinct, their independence is not as obvious as some have thought. The fact that these arguments are not equivalent is important because skeptical arguments that appeal to underdetermination principles cannot be refuted by simply denying closure. So, the strategy for responding to skepticism offered by Nozick/Dretske does not seem an adequate solution.