In the past 15 years a host of critical thinking books have appeared that teach students to find flaws in the arguments of others by learning to detect a number of informal fallacies. This book is not in that tradition. The authors of this book believe that while students learn to become vicious critics, they still continue to make the very mistakes they criticize in others. Thus, this book has adopted the approach of teaching the construction of good arguments first (...) and then introducing criticism as a secondary skill. Moreover, the emphasis of the book is not on learning to name fallacies, but on being able to identify weaknesses in an argument so as to be able to construct an effective critique of that argument. The book is accompanied by a workbook featuring a wealth of examples to help students acquire the material. (shrink)

C. K. Grant; X*—On a Definition of Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 73, Issue 1, 1 June 1973, Pages 157–166, https://doi.org/10.1093/a.

In one way or another the theory and practice of modern medicine is confronting us with many dilemmas, chiefly, though not exclusively, of a moral character; the transplantation of organs, abortion, and euthanasia are examples, and closely associated with these are more obviously conceptual problems such as the definition of death and, for that matter, of life itself. Contemporary moral philosophers have been strangely silent on these matters, and have been content to leave the field to lawyers and churchmen and (...) those few medical men both able and willing to reflect upon their practices. (shrink)

To speak of human rights in the twenty-first century is to speak of proportionality. Proportionality has been received into the constitutional doctrine of courts in continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, South Africa, and the United States, as well as the jurisprudence of treaty-based legal systems such as the European Convention on Human Rights. Proportionality provides a common analytical framework for resolving the great moral and political questions confronting political communities. But behind the singular appeal to proportionality (...) lurks a range of different understandings. This volume brings together many of the world's leading constitutional theorists - proponents and critics of proportionality - to debate the merits of proportionality, the nature of rights, the practice of judicial review, and moral and legal reasoning. Their essays provide important new perspectives on this leading doctrine in human rights law. (shrink)

The debates about human free will are traditionally the concern of metaphysics but neuroscientists have recently entered the field arguing that acts of the will are determined by brain events themselves causal products of other events. We examine that claim through the example of free or voluntary switch of perception in relation to the Necker cube. When I am asked to see the cube in one way, I decide whether I will follow the command (or do as I am asked) (...) using skills that reason and language give to me and change my brain states accordingly. The voluntary shift of perspective in seeing the Necker cube this way or that exemplifies the top-down control exercised by a human being on the basis of the role of language and meaning in their activity. It also indicates the lived story that is at the centre of each human consciousness. In the third part of this essay, three arguments are used to undermine metaphysical objections to the very idea of top-down self control. (shrink)

This paper examines methods for narrating consciousness in game theory. In order to represent how players process their environment, posture towards one another, and hold themselves accountable to their own thinking, I find two distinct ways that game theorists narrate the consciousness of their players. Quoted monologue is a player’s internal language, which can be articulated to show a player’s perspective to the reader. The other narrative mode is psycho-narration, which puts the external technical skills of the game-theorist into the (...) narrator’s hands to describe a player’s mental activity with more complexity than quoted monologue. Quoted monologue and psycho-narration communicate players’ thoughts in ways that convince the readers of the players’ positions, clarify game solution concepts, and enliven the written text. (shrink)

Research on bilingualism has grown exponentially in recent years. However, the comprehension of speech in noise, given the ubiquity of both bilingualism and noisy environments, has seen only limited focus. Electroencephalogram studies in monolinguals show an increase in alpha power when listening to speech in noise, which, in the theoretical context where alpha power indexes attentional control, is thought to reflect an increase in attentional demands. In the current study, English/French bilinguals with similar second language proficiency and who varied in (...) terms of age of L2 acquisition from 0 to 15 years completed a speech perception in noise task. Participants were required to identify the final word of high and low semantically constrained auditory sentences such as “Stir your coffee with a spoon” vs. “Bob could have known about the spoon” in both of their languages and in both noise and quiet during electrophysiological recording. We examined the effects of language, AoA, semantic constraint, and listening condition on participants’ induced alpha power during speech comprehension. Our results show an increase in alpha power when participants were listening in their L2, suggesting that listening in an L2 requires additional attentional control compared to the first language, particularly early in processing during word identification. Additionally, despite similar proficiency across participants, our results suggest that under difficult processing demands, AoA modulates the amount of attention required to process the second language. (shrink)

THE PURPOSE of this paper is to clarify some of the logical problems raised by certain uses of the word “imply”which, although very familiar in ordinary language, have not been adequately investigated by philosophers. There have been numerous references to this type of implication in recent philosophical writings. Some of these are listed below. 2 However, there does not exist, to my knowledge, any account of this concept in its own right; this deficiency I hope to remedy, in part, in (...) the following remarks. (shrink)

In recent years philosophers have given a good deal of attention to imperatives. They have concerned themselves mainly with the logical grammar of sentences of this kind, that is to say their relations to each other and to interrogative and indicative sentences. Very often this topic has been raised in terms of the problem ‘Is imperative inference possible, and if so, what kind of inference is it?’. Many philosophers have contended that there are logically valid inferences that involve imperative sentences. (...) Against this it has been argued that no such inferences are possible. It has even been held that there are no such things as imperatives at all – regarded, that is, as types of expression logically sui generis and independent of indicative sentences. (shrink)