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The virtuous tortoise
Publication . Botting, David Simon; Instituto de Filosofia da NOVA (IFILNOVA); Wiley-Blackwell
There is no philosophically interesting distinction to be made between inference-rules and premises. That there is such a distinction is often held to follow from the possibility of infinite regress illustrated by Carroll’s story of Achilles and the tortoise. I will argue that this is wrong on three separate grounds. Consequently, Carroll’s fable provides no motivation to abandon the traditional logical separation of arguments into their premises and conclusions. There is no proposition that must be taken to be a rule and must not be taken as a premise.
Toulmin's analytic validity
Publication . Botting, David Simon; Instituto de Filosofia da NOVA (IFILNOVA); Universidad Diego Portales
Although Toulmin says several things that are plainly false, I hope to show in this paper that Toulmin’s conception of analytic arguments is not as incoherent as some have supposed and does in fact classify a theoretically significant class of arguments. However, analytic validity turns out to be not much different from semantic validity. Since the distinction between formal validity and semantic validity is well recognized by logicians, the charge made by Toulmin that they could not accept the distinction between formal validity and analytic validity is confounded. This eliminates one major plank in the case he builds against the analytic ideal. Thus, I want to defend Toulmin’s conception but reject the moral he draws from it.
The cumulative force of analogies
Publication . Botting, David Simon; Instituto de Filosofia da NOVA (IFILNOVA); Nicolaus Copernicus University
In this paper I will argue that most objections to deductive analyses of a priori analogies are incorrect, often involve basic misinterpretations of what the deductive reconstruction of those arguments are saying, and sometimes also betray a confusion about what part of the reasoning corresponds to the analogical inference. In particular, I will be focusing on a raft of objections made by Juthe in [2015] and subject his alternative views to criticism. I will then argue that Juthe does implicitly have a good argument against deductivism: adding further analogues seems to have a cumulative force that they would not have on a deductivist analysis. This is so not only in ordinary analogical arguments but, perhaps surprisingly, with a priori analogical arguments. I will then argue that this does not favour a sui generis view of the analogical argument over inductivist views, and attempt to show that a confirmation-theoretic approach to analogical inference makes the best sense of our intuitions about the strength of analogical arguments.
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Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
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3599-PPCDT
Número da atribuição
PTDC/FIL-FIL/110117/2009