Daniel H. Cohen

Missed Opportunities in Argument Evaluation

Why do we hold arguers culpable for missing obvious objections against their arguments but not for missing obvious lines of reasoning for their positions? In both cases, their arguments are not as strong as they could be. Two factors cause this: adversarial models of argumentation and the permeable boundaries separating argumentation, meta-argumentation, and argument evaluation. Strategic considerations and dialectical obligations partially justify the asymmetry; virtue argumentation theory explains when and why it is not justified.

Schoolhouses, jailhouses and the house of being : The tragedy of philosophy's metaphors

As a rule, there is nothing in the words themselves to mark off metaphors from literal language. If a boundary could somehow be drawn, it would be in constant need of re-adjustment as metaphors become entrenched, idiomatic, and finally literal, and literal phrases are put to figurative or hyperbolic, and then metaphorical uses. Further, there is no algorithmic recovery of the intended meaning of a metaphor from the meanings of its components, no function that takes literal meanings as its arguments and has metaphorical meaning as its output. That is, metaphors are syntactically invisible, pragmatically unstable, and semantically under-determined. Their creation, use, and interpretation are almost impenetrable mysteries. As if to spite semantic theorists, they are also linguistic commonplaces, present in every kind of discourse. The discourse of philosophy is no exception to this rule, availing itself of the various stylistic, heuristic, and explanatory roles metaphors can play. Philosophy also produces metaphors of another sort, metaphors that differ in important ways from the metaphors of art and literature, as well as the metaphors of the natural and social sciences. These “grand“ metaphors are lasting monuments to the triumphs of philosophical discourse, even as they are also testimony to the failures of philosophical theorizing. This is because philosophy’s grand metaphors were never intended that way. They are better read as structural hypotheses that have become metaphors only after failing as literal truths. Ironically, it is precisely as metaphors that these images are integrated into our ways of thinking. In the end, thought itself is re-structured, and these failures as descriptive truths succeed in becoming “constitutive truths” of a new reality.

Conditionals, quantification, and strong mathematical induction

where “hrx” is read “x is a natural number” and “@” is the property in question. Restricting the domain of discourse to numbers still leaves three quantifiers and three conditionals. And all this is without even broaching the matter of second-order quantification over properties. As anyone who has tried to explain mathematical induction can attest, the principle is heuristically problematic. It never fails to inspire scepticism, confusion, or both. While the logical complexity of the principle may be partly to blame for confusion, skepticism arises from another source: healthy logical intuitions. Three factors exacerbate the problem. First, the presence of antecedently nested conditionals is awkward in the best of circumstances; conditionals that are doubly so nested approach unintelligibility. The logical structure is indeed unusually complex. Second, the blanket use of “material implication” as the formal embodiment of conditionality fails to distinguish among conditional connectives suitable for universal