Modern epistemic questions have largely been focused around the individual and her ability to acquire knowledge autonomously. More recently epistemologists have begun to look more broadly in providing accounts of knowledge by considering its social context, where the individual depends on others for true beliefs. Hardwig explains the effect of this shift starkly, arguing that to reject epistemic dependency is to deny certain true beliefs widely held throughout society and, more specifically, it is to deny that science and scholarship can (...) provide true belief. Alternatively, Hardwig argues that beliefs could be granted to communities or groups but denied to individuals. This paper approaches these broad assertions using a group agency model from List and Pettit. Through a discussion of the ‘epistemic desideratum’ of group agents, I conclude that List and Pettit give us reason to accept some of Hardwig's concerns, but that attributing beliefs to groups does not require us to deny them to individuals, rather an individual can use a group agent as a source of epistemic dependence.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.GROUP AGENCY AND EPISTEMIC DEPENDENCYVolume 9, Issue 3Aaron DewittDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.13Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. GROUP AGENCY AND EPISTEMIC DEPENDENCYVolume 9, Issue 3Aaron DewittDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.13Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. GROUP AGENCY AND EPISTEMIC DEPENDENCYVolume 9, Issue 3Aaron DewittDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.13Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Why do people seemingly want to be scared by movies and feel pity for fictional characters when they avoid situations in real life that arouse these same negative emotions? Although the domain of relevant artworks encompasses far more than just tragedy, the general problem is typically called the paradox of tragedy. The paradox boils down to a simple question: If people avoid pain then why do people want to experience art that is painful? I discuss six popular solutions to the (...) paradox: conversion, control, compensatory, meta-response, catharsis, and rich experience theories. (shrink)

Emotions involve complex processes produced by interactions between motives, beliefs, percepts, etc. E.g. real or imagined fulfilment or violation of a motive, or triggering of a 'motive-generator', can disturb processes produced by other motives. To understand emotions, therefore, we need to understand motives and the types of processes they can produce. This leads to a study of the global architecture of a mind. Some constraints on the evolution of minds are disussed. Types of motives and the processes they generate are (...) sketched. (shrink)

Photographs furnish evidence. This is true in both formal and informal contexts. The use of photographs as legal evidence goes back to the very earliest days of photography, and they have been used in American trials since around the time of the Civil War. Photographs may also serve as historical evidence (for example, about the Civil War). And they serve in informal contexts as evidence about all sorts of things, such as what we and our loved ones looked like in (...) the past. (shrink)

According to the standard analysis, humor theories can be classified into three neatly identifiable groups:incongruity, superiority, and relief theories. Incongruity theory is the leading approach and includes historical figures such as Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and perhaps has its origins in comments made by Aristotle in the Rhetoric. Primarily focusing on the object of humor, this school sees humor as a response to an incongruity, a term broadly used to include ambiguity, logical impossibility, irrelevance, and inappropriateness. The paradigmatic Superiority theorist (...) is Thomas Hobbes, who said that humor arises from a “sudden glory” felt when we recognize our supremacy over others. Plato and Aristotle are generally considered superiority theorists, who emphasize the aggressive feelings that fuel humor. The third group, Relief theory, is typically associated with Sigmund Freud and Herbert Spencer, who saw humor as fundamentally a way to release or save energy generated by repression. In addition, this article will explore a fourth group of theories of humor: play theory. Play theorists are not so much listing necessary conditions for something’s counting as humor, as they are asking us to look at humor as an extension of animal play. (shrink)

Many cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion argue that supernatural explanations are byproducts of our cognitive adaptations. An influential argument states that our supernatural explanations result from a tendency to generate anthropomorphic explanations, and that this tendency is a byproduct of an error management strategy because agents tend to be associated with especially high fitness costs. We propose instead that anthropomorphic and other supernatural explanations result as features of a broader toolkit of well-designed cognitive adaptations, which are designed for explaining (...) the abstract and causal structure of complex, unobservable, and uncertain phenomena that have substantial impacts on fitness. Specifically, we argue that (1) mental representations about the abstract vs. the supernatural are largely overlapping, if not identical, and (2) when the data-generating processes for scarce and ambiguous observations are complex and opaque, a naive observer can improve a bias-variance trade-off by starting with a simple, underspecified explanation that Western observers readily interpret as “supernatural.” We then argue that (3) in many cases, knowledge specialists across cultures offer pragmatic services that involve apparently supernatural explanations, and their clients are frequently willing to pay them in a market for useful and effective services. We propose that at least some ethnographic descriptions of religion might actually reflect ordinary and adaptive responses to novel problems such as illnesses and natural disasters, where knowledge specialists possess and apply the best available explanations about phenomena that would otherwise be completely mysterious and unpredictable. (shrink)

What is the relation between intelligence and computation? Although the difficulty of defining `intelligence' is widely recognized, many are unaware that it is hard to give a satisfactory definition of `computational' if computation is supposed to provide a non-circular explanation for intelligent abilities. The only well-defined notion of `computation' is what can be generated by a Turing machine or a formally equivalent mechanism. This is not adequate for the key role in explaining the nature of mental processes, because it is (...) too general, as many computations involve nothing mental, nor even processes: they are simply abstract structures. We need to combine the notion of `computation' with that of `machine'. This may still be too restrictive, if some non-computational mechanisms prove to be useful for intelligence. We need a theory-based taxonomy of {\em architectures} and {\em mechanisms} and corresponding process types. Computational machines my turn out to be a sub-class of the machines available for implementing intelligent agents. The more general analysis starts with the notion of a system with independently variable, causally interacting sub-states that have different causal roles, including both `belief-like' and `desire-like' sub-states, and many others. There are many significantly different such architectures. For certain architectures (including simple computers), some sub-states have a semantic interpretation for the system. The relevant concept of semantics is defined partly in terms of a kind of Tarski-like structural correspondence (not to be confused with isomorphism). This always leaves some semantic indeterminacy, which can be reduced by causal loops involving the environment. But the causal links are complex, can share causal pathways, and always leave mental states to some extent semantically indeterminate. (shrink)

Given the close relationship between the modern arms industry and the military, engineers and other professionals who work in the arms industry should be held accountable to the principles of just war theory. While they do not deploy weapons on the battlefield and are not in the military chain of command, technical professionals nonetheless have a moral duty to abide by principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. They are morally responsible both for choosing the companies that employ (...) them (and to whom these companies sell arms) and a well as what types of arms they develop. (shrink)

Any analysis of "In the Company of Men" is forced to answer three questions of central importance to the ethics of humor: What does it mean to find sexist humor funny? What are the various sources of humor? And, can moral flaws with attempts at humor increase their humorousness? I argued that although merely finding a joke funny in a neutral context cannot tell you anything reliable about a person's beliefs, in context, a joke may reveal a great deal about (...) one’s social attitudes, or feelings of insecurity. Especially in its portrayal of Howard, the film exposes the role of insecurity as a source of humor. Not only can insecurity make one more prone to laugh, but it can also make someone seem funnier in some contexts. I contended that this shows that a strong version of the superiority theory of humor is clearly wrong. Furthermore, the disparate audience reactions to Chad's jokes showed that the morally sensitive who were aware of the purpose of his jokes would see them as ethically flawed. Rather than making the jokes more amusing, the fact that the jokes were considered to be ethically flawed made them less funny. Hence, immoralism is most likely false. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This essay intends to create a path forward for philosophical work in higher education that is sensitive to the discursive, organizational, economic, epistemic, and political cultures of the institution. This essay will therefore not provide a grand theory of higher education that might be overlaid onto university practice. Instead, as we will argue, any viable philosophy of higher education must not only recognize but also be prepared to account for and harness the heterogeneity of theoretical, organizational, economic, epistemic, and professional (...) perspectives that are the ground of institutions of higher learning. (shrink)

In Knowing and Learning as Creative Action, Aaron Stoller makes the case that contemporary schooling is grounded in a flawed model of knowing, which draws together mistakes in thinking about the nature of the self, of knowledge, and of reality, which are contained in the epistemological proposition: 'S knows that p' (SP). To the contrary, Stoller argues that the German conception of Bildung must replace SP thinking as the guiding metaphor of knowing within educational research and practice. Central to (...) this reconstruction is a theory of creative inquiry which claims that knowledge emerges from embodied, social engagement in the world and therefore knowing is a form of creative action. Stoller constructs a new paradigm of knowing and learning as an emergent process of creative making, the goal of which is the cultivation of what he calls maker's knowledge, which is the capacity for and habit of creative action. (shrink)

This paper offers a short and biased overview of the history of discussion and controversy about the role of different forms of representation in intelligent agents. It repeats and extends some of the criticisms of the `logicist' approach to AI that I first made in 1971, while also defending logic for its power and generality. It identifies some common confusions regarding the role of visual or diagrammatic reasoning including confusions based on the fact that different forms of representation may be (...) used at different levels in an implementation hierarchy. This is contrasted with the way in the use of one form of representation (e.g. pictures) can be {\em controlled} using another (e.g. logic, or programs). Finally some questions are asked about the role of metrical information in biological visual systems. (shrink)

This article explores Michael Faraday’s “Historical Sketch of Electro‐Magnetism” as a fruitful source for understanding the epistemic significance of experimentation. In this work Faraday provides a catalog of the numerous experimental and theoretical developments in the early history of electromagnetism. He also describes methods that enable experimentalists to dissociate experimental results from the theoretical commitments generating their research. An analysis of the methods articulated in this sketch is instructive for confronting epistemological worries about the theory‐dependence of experimentation. †To contact the (...) author, please write to: 10289 Saint Katherine Lane, Saint Ann, MO 63074; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

findings from affective neuroscience research. I shall focus mainly on, but in a manner which, I hope is.

In her book, Moral Status, Mary Anne Warren defends a comprehensive theory of the moral status of various entities. Under this theory, she argues that animals may have some moral rights but that their rights are much weaker in strength than the rights of humans, who have rights in the fullest, strongest sense. Subsequently, Warren believes that our duties to animals are far weaker than our duties to other humans. This weakness is especially evident from the fact that Warren believes (...) that it is frequently permissible for humans to kill animals for food. Warren’s argument for her view consists primarily in the belief that we have inevitable practical conflicts with animals that make it impossible to grant them equal rights without sacrificing basic human interests. However, her arguments fail to justify her conclusions. In particular, Warren fails to justify her beliefs that animals do not have an equal right to life and that it is permissible for humans to kill animals for food. (shrink)

This paper attempts to characterise a unifying overview of the practice of software engineers, AI designers, developers of evolutionary forms of computation, designers of adaptive systems, etc. The topic overlaps with theoretical biology, developmental psychology and perhaps some aspects of social theory. Just as much of theoretical computer science follows the lead of engineering intuitions and tries to formalise them, there are also some important emerging high level cross disciplinary ideas about natural information processing architectures and evolutionary mechanisms and that (...) can perhaps be unified and formalised in the future. There is some speculation about the evolution of human cognitive architectures and consciousness. (shrink)

This paper develops ‘primitive accumulation’ prior to and then in Karl Marx’s œuvre. By exploring the concept in Adam Smith and Sir James Steuart the paper highlights early influences on Marx’s evolving constructions. Marx’s construction in the Grundrisse begins with a logical determination much like Smith’s and moves, by drawing on Steuart, towards a socio-historical determination of a transitional violence. In Capital, ‘primitive accumulation’ still retains its transitional structure and delimited history, but it also points to the oppressive afterlife of (...) the processes of primitive accumulation. The political key to ‘primitive accumulation’ in Capital flows from determining primitive accumulation as temporally bounded, but having an afterlife in the oppressive social reproduction of capitalist societies. Against deriving political stakes through extended readings of ‘primitive accumulation’, this paper shows that an ‘originating’ view is textually accurate in a way that centres rather than sidelines the social reproduction of oppressions in capitalist societies. (shrink)

Svirsky, Howard, and Berman address the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ’s oversight of tobacco products, the newest major area of regulation Congress assigned to the FDA. They discus...

The trouble with theory and practice -- Preparing a place for a Peircean ethics -- Intelligent habits -- The metaphysics of habits -- Thinking of habits -- Self-controlled habits.

In this article, I assess the current state of neuroaesthetics by reviewing 10 recent books on neuroscientific and evolutionary aspects of aesthetic cognition. These books largely continue the main thrust of this genre since its inception. Virtually all are insightful and thought-provoking, though their individual strengths vary. Among them, Shimamura and Palmer's edited book, Aesthetic Science, provides the most useful and balanced interdisciplinary framework, making philosophy and psychology equal partners with neuroscience. This pluralistic mode, dethroning neuroscience from its usual hegemony, (...) seems best poised to address heretofore neglected issues in neuroaesthetics research. I address several dichotomous tensions—high versus low art, the drive for creative innovation versus evolutionarily canalized aesthetic biases, and explicit versus implicit aspects of aesthetic cognition—to identify promising future research directions, which can best be fulfilled though interdisciplinary cooperation and debate, with a continued emphasis on evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Glenberg's theory is rich and provocative, in our view, but we find fault with the premise that all memory representations are embodied. We cite instances in which that premise mispredicts empirical results or underestimates human capabilities, and we suggest that the motivation for the embodiment idea – to avoid the symbol-grounding problem – should not, ultimately, constrain psychological theorizing.

This paper seeks to deflate G. A. Cohen ’s recent meta-ethical argument that fundamental principles must be “fact-insensitive.” That argument does not advance Cohen ’s dispute with Rawls and other social contract theorists. There is attenuated sense of “factinsensitivity” which they can happily grant, which Cohen never rules out on specifically metaethical grounds. While his barrage of substantive arguments may retain independent force, the argument from fact-insensitivity is largely inconsequential.

To what extent should those of us concerned with justice in the global economy worry about exploitation? As I understand it, this question is in part a question about fairness and where, if at all, it applies. On one plausible view, exploitation, in the most basic, morally problematic sense, arises in bargaining situations: one party exploits another party when and only when it uses its superior bargaining position to win terms favorable to it in the agreement being made between them. (...) (The resulting unfair agreement can also be said to be exploitative, in a secondary sense, if it resulted, or could only have resulted, from a wrongfully exploitative bargaining process.) What distinguishes morally problematic exploitation from morally innocent ways of “taking advantage of an opportunity” (e.g., sitting outside on a fine day) is certain fairness expectations: the exploiting party uses its superior bargaining position to get the other to accept an unfair agreement, in breach of an obligation to instead offer and negotiate toward fair terms. Regardless of what is fair, the party with the upper hand doesn’t budge. (shrink)

By making use of a distinction between “making something happen” and “allowing it to happen,” a polluting act can be defined as making something happen with widely scattered externalized costs. Not all polluting acts are blameworthy, but we can investigate which polluting acts are sufficiently badly performed as to be blameworthy. This definition of polluting act permits us to justify the belief we often have that behavior concerning pollution may be blameworthy, even when we do not know whether the behavior (...) caused harm. (shrink)

Jablonka & Lamb (J&L) refer only implicitly to aspects of cognitive competence that preceded both evolution of human language and language learning in children. These aspects are important for evolution and development but need to be understood using the design-stance, which the book adopts only for molecular and genetic processes, not for behavioural and symbolic processes. Design-based analyses reveal more routes from genome to behaviour than J&L seem to have considered. This both points to gaps in our understanding of evolution (...) and epigenetic processes and may lead to possible ways of filling the gaps. (shrink)

Discussions on the UKCRC and CPHC email lists about research funding, including mention of the high proportion of research time and funding budgets that goes into writing and assessing proposals recently provoked me into reviving an idea that always seems to produce shock and horror, even though I think that (with suitable refinements) it could be an excellent way to fund research, namely, using a properly designed lottery.

and who has recently founded a company Numenta to develop 'a new type of computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex'. With science writer Sandra Blakeslee he wrote a book On Intelligence . I confess the book is still on my (very long) 'to be read' list, though I have read and heard quite a lot about it.

A peculiar feature of Hutcheson’s system is his claim that there exist no original pains in the imagination, and hence no real displeasures concerning form or beauty. This position, when set against a clear emphasis upon the pains of the moral sense in apprehending evil, seems to render tenuous his frequent analogies between the experiences of beauty and goodness. In light of this apparent discrepancy in Hutcheson’s argument, the repeated use of the term “moral beauty” presents interpretive difficulties, particularly on (...) the matter of whether, and in what way, goodness is itself a species of beauty. These problems can be surmounted by way of close attention to Hutcheson’s connection and ordering of the various “senses.” On the present interpretation, Hutcheson denies formal displeasure aspart of a broader theological argument concerning the moral function of the imagination. On this view, “moral beauty” is a special type of imaginative pleasure. (shrink)

Peter Singer argues that when some fail to do their part in alleviating suffering, the rest of us must take up their slack. In response, L. J. Cohen, Liam Murphy, and David Miller argue that such a requirement would be unfair. No one, they contend, should be required to contribute more than she would be required to under full compliance. I argue against Cohen, Murphy, and Miller that we are obligated to take up slack left by noncontributors, but agree that (...) we are thereby treated unfairly. Drawing on the literatures on group causation and moral responsibility, I argue that noncontributors wrong those they fail to help and those who take up their slack. I refer to the latter kind of wrong as “burden dumping.” Furthermore, I argue that my account applies whether we conceive of rescue duties as discretionary or nondiscretionary. One might think that if my duties to rescue do not require me to contribute to any particular rescue effort, I do not dump burdens on anyone when I do nothing. In reply, I argue that when I have a nondiscretionary duty to contribute to a particular rescue effort, I unfairly dump burdens on those contributing to that effort when I fail to do my part. Similarly, when my duty to rescue is discretionary and I do nothing, I unfairly dump burdens on everyone whose rescue efforts I might have contributed to. Using this apparatus, we can account for the force of arguments such as Singer’s as well as the idea that those who dump burdens are blameworthy for treating other rescuers unfairly. (shrink)

The Standard Picture holds that the contribution to the law made by an authoritative legal pronouncement is directly explained by the linguistic content of that pronouncement. This essay defends the Standard Picture from Mark Greenberg’s purported counterexamples drawn from patterns of statutory interpretation in U.S. criminal law. Once relevant features of the U.S. rule of recognition are admitted into the analysis—namely, that it arranges sources of law hierarchically, and that judicial decisions are sources of valid law—Greenberg’s counterexamples are revealed as (...) only apparent, not genuine. The legal norms that result from the patterns of interpretation he identifies can be directly explained in terms of the linguistic contents of authoritative pronouncements: judicial decisions. Furthermore, those norms can be understood as modifications of the valid norms contained in their originating statutes because judicial decisions are permitted ‘explanatory intermediaries’ of statutes by the rule of recognition. (shrink)

Does the very existence of money depend in any sense on our “recognition” of it? According to certain functionalist views, no such attitudes are necessary. This paper argues to the contrary for recognition dependence, of a minimal sort. What’s needed in a population is (1) the functional know-how of money use, (2) an ideational structure founded upon people’s thinking about what others are thinking, and (3) wide enough acceptance of a payment or settlement obligation (as expressed, e.g., when someone asks (...) a vendor “So what do I owe ya?”). (shrink)

This article questions the extent to which interpretation explains literature, arguing that interpretation and explanation are not the same thing. It first engages with recent critical discussions of method and explanation in literary studies, finding that they are not much about method at all. It then offers a methodological framework that goes beyond various "method wars" over "critique" and "postcritique," and toward ways of explaining literature that are not reducible to matters of interpretation.

Introduction -- Being/becoming material -- Knowledge & class: coming to process -- Truth-telling, inquiry, and affirmative ethics -- Relational inquiry as radical cartography -- Higher education and the governance of things -- Refusal & resistance.

The aim of this volume is to consider connections among issues in metaphilosophy, historiographical method, and the formation of philosophical canons. Here I consider an ancient metaphilosophical position very different from anything accepted in mainstream academic philosophy today, but which, I believe, merits revival in a form appropriate to our era. I call this position “metaphilosophical eudaimonism” because it takes human flourishing to be the ultimate goal of philosophy. I first explain the position before considering its implications for philosophy’s relationship (...) to its history, for the historiography of philosophy, and for the role of canons in philosophy. Along the way, I develop a perspective on the possibility of trans-historical knowledge grounded in a Husserlian analysis of the act of consciousness. (shrink)

I argue that our present crisis of meaning is grounded in what Dallas Willard called "the disappearance of moral knowledge," and in institutional changes related to this disappearance. Following Frankl, I argue that meaning requires self-transcendence via commitment to "higher" values, but the disappearance of moral knowledge has obscured the reality of such values, and hence has obscured the path to meaningful self-transcendence.

The achilles heel of the universal declaration of human rights -- The concept of human rights during the cold war -- Birth of the post cold war human rights dogma -- Toward a human rights without freedom -- The loss of America's human rights exceptionalism -- Human rights versus natural rights : a convergence against liberty -- Conclusion : toward reforming human rights.

Accompanying an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, this book is the most comprehensive catalogue on the work of this internationally recognized architectural firm.

This paper follows a trend in engineering ethics away from universal moral theories towards more contingent/contextual approaches such as pragmatist and care ethics. These methodological considerations are treated in the context of the Volkswagen Diesel Emissions scandal as a case study in the “paradox of loyalty,”. Building upon a combined pragmatist-care ethics approach, the article outlines an “ethics of commitment,” inspired by the moral philosophy of Josiah Royce. The ethics of commitment locates the site of moral value in an individual’s (...) “commitment to a cause,” where a “cause” refers to a purposive community of persons oriented by a shared end or ideal. The ethics of commitment improves upon a pragmatist-care ethics in two notable ways: first, addressing the problem of determining wrongdoing via pragmatist ethics, and second, by emphasizing the costly nature of moral action as a critical part of ethical deliberation, rather than appealing to empathy or moral sentiment. This process—described metaphorically as “centrifugal commitment”—remains contingent and fallible, but in a way that does justice to the broad scope of moral responsibility incumbent upon engineers. (shrink)

Al-Abharī’s Isagoge is an introductory primer in logic which has received numerous commentaries, each geared towards students of various levels of familiarity with this instrumental science. Al-Fanārī’s advanced commentary on the Isagoge, called al-Fawāʾid al-Fanāriyya, has confounded students of logic for centuries due to its terse and dense style as well as the presumption that the reader knows well the science of disputation along with the subtle interpretive disagreements discussed in other texts and commentaries. Sājaqlīzādah’s primer on disputation entitled al-Waladiyya, (...) written nearly 300 years after al-Fanārī’s commentary, provides useful examples of the possible claims, objections, and defenses available to one making scholarly claims in the form of definitions, classifications, and propositional assents or syllogistic reasoning. In this article, I explore several instances of al-Fanārī’s use of the terms and methods of disputation in order to defend definitions or classifications found al-Abharī’s Isagoge. I aim to identify the specific disputational moves used by al-Fanārī, drawing from those described by Sājaqlīzādah. In doing so, I demonstrate that this important advanced commentary on a popular logic primer is best understood through the lens of disputation. I also argue that Sājaqlīzādah’s suggested methods of making claims, objections, and defenses can be transposed in whole or in part from one category of claim—definitions, classifications, assents—to another, indicating a greater complexity of disputational possibilities than his introductory handbook provides. (shrink)