John Woods

The Petitio: Aristotle's Five Ways

If one looks to the current textbook lore for reliable taxonomic and analytical information about the petitio principii, one is met with conceptual disarray and much too much nonsense. The present writers have recently attempted to furnish the beginnings of a theoretical reconstruction of this fallacy which is at once faithful to its formidable complexity yet useful as guide for its detection and avoidance.1 The fact is that the petitio has had a lengthy and interesting history, and in this paper we shall want to explore certain features of its development, such as it may have been. The principal origins of the concept of circular argument are to be found in Aristotle. The Aristotelian doctrine recurs with variations in the sophismata literature of the middle ages and in logic texts and manuals right up to the present day. A particularly significant deviation from Aristotles approach makes its appearance in astute

Slippery Slopes and Collapsing Taboos

A slippery slope argument is an argument to this twofold effect. First, that if a policy or practice P is permitted, then we lack the dialectical resources to demonstrate that a similar policy or practice P* is not permissible. Since P* is indeed not permissible, we should not endorse policy or practice P. At the heart of such arguments is the idea of dialectical impotence, the inability to stop the acceptance of apparently small deviations from a heretofore secure policy or practice from leading to apparently large and unacceptable deviations. Using examples of analogical arguments and sorites arguments I examine this phenomenon in the context of collapsing taboos.

Ideals of rationality in dialogic

Needed for such dialogue games as dialectic are appropriate standards of fairness and rationality. The rules of procedure of dialectic must describe a game playable by actual human participants. The present paper centers on certain idealizations of the dialectician that are not allowable.

Speaking Your Mind: Large Inarticulateness Constitutional and Circumstantial

When someone is asked to speak his mind, it is sometimes possible for him to furnish what his utterance appears to have omitted. In such cases we might say that he had a mind to speak. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true. Asked to speak his mind, our speaker finds that he has no mind to speak. When it is possible to speak ones mind and when not is largely determined by the kinds of beings we are and by the kinds of resources we are able to draw upon. In either case, not speaking ones mind is leaving something out whose articulation would or could matter for the purposes for which one was speaking in the first place. Inarticulation is no fleetingly contingent and peripheral phenomenon in human thinking and discourse. It is a substantial and dominant commonplace. In Part One I attempt to say something about what it is about the human agent that makes inarticulateness so rife. In Part Two, I consider various strategies for making the unarticulated explicit, and certain constraints on such processes. I shall suggest, among other things, that standard treatments of enthymematic reconstruction are fundamentally misconceived.

And so Indeed are Perfect Cheat

Ethical discourse and fallacy theory come together in a natural way over concepts such as bias, prejudice, preconceived opinion, prototypical and stereotypical thinking, dogmatism and loyalty. By and large, these are concepts that have not been sufficiently worked up to bear the theoretical weight either of ethics or of logic. The present paper seeks to ameliorate this situation. It proposes that situations describable by any such concepts partition into (a) the rationally and morally regrettable and (b) the rationally and morally impeccable, and in any event, unavoidable. Finding (b) will come as a surprise to some theorists.

Rationality Ideals and Mentality

Mackenzie, this journal, this issue, convincingly shows that in certain dialogue games (commitment games) there are procedural restrictions similar to those that I impose on rationality idealizations. But, whereas my rationality analysis is set in the context of belief games, commitment games do not postulate beliefs. Is this significant? I suggest that mackenzie thinks that it is. There follow discussions of Psychologism and Behaviourism.

Just How Stupid is Postmodernism

A paper prepared for presentation to the Royal Society of Canada, Vancouver, and thereafter to the University of Lethbridge, and the International Joint Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Reasoning, Bonn.

Is philosophy progressive

Any adequate attempt to discuss progressivity in philosophy should provide some explanation of why philosophy persistently honours “the old and the false” and deals with original texts in a way in which science does not. An attempt is made to answer this question by appealing to: (1) the aporetic character of philosophy; (2) the semantical solipsism of philosophy; (3) the subjectivity of philosophy, and; (4) poetical continuities in philosophy.

Sumner on Abortion: Utilitarian Abortion

In Abortion and Moral Theory , L. W. Sumner develops a moderate view of abortion, having dispatched as “indefensible” (ix) “two equally prominent and extreme positions: the liberal view … and the conservative view” (ix). It is a distinctive feature of the book that, having formulated what he regards as the correct intuitive position, the author seeks for it “the needed foundation for a moderate view of abortion” (ix), since “the defense of a moderate position must ultimately be grounded in moral theory” (ix), in which the position acquires “theoretical depth”, and without which it would lack “philosophical justification” (ix). The moral theory in which Professor Sumner seeks to lodge his moderate position is the “classical version of utilitarianism” (x), which “can serve as the deep structure of a moderate view of abortion” (195). Thus, a central task for the appraisal of Abortion and Moral Theory is to ascertain whether classical utilitarianism can be made to accommodate “common-sense morality [which] plainly regards murder as wrong principally because of its central effects …”, that is, because murder causes “its victim some form of harm” (201).