We explore the relationship between argument and narrative with reference to parables. Parables are typically thought to convey a message. In examining a parable, we can ask what that message is, whether the story told provides reasons for the message, and whether those reasons are good reasons. In exploring these questions, we employ as an inves-tigative technique the strategy of reconstructing parables as argu-ments. We then proceed to con-sider the cogency of those argu-ments. One can offer arguments through narratives and, (...) in particu-lar, through parables, but that do-ing so likely brings more risks than benefits, from an epistemic point of view. (shrink)

Rodden writes, “How do stories persuade us? How do they ‘move’—and move us? The short answer: by analogies.” Rodden’s claim is a natural first view, also held by others. This chapter considers the extent to which this view is true and helpful in understanding how fictional narratives, taken as wholes, may be argumentative, comparing it to the two principal (though not necessarily exclusive) alternatives that have been proposed: understanding fictional narratives as exhibiting the structure of suppositional argument, or the structure (...) of a kind of transcendental argument. Three key aspects of understanding a fictional narrative as an argument from analogy are identified. First, the argument will be relativistic or depend in an essential way upon the circumstances or intentions of the auditor or author. Second, in view of the first aspect, the argument will be loose and subjective, and accordingly less likely to yield knowledge. Third, the argument will not exhibit a distinctive structure applicable only to fictional narratives. I find that the third, and sometimes the first and second, of these same three aspects apply to understanding fictional narratives as suppositional arguments. I present considerations that point to a way of establishing that some extended fictions exhibit the structure of a kind of transcendental argument that is neither relativistic nor subjective, is knowledge-generating, and is uniquely applicable to fictional narratives. This supports literary cognitivism—the thesis that “literary fiction can be a source of knowledge in a way that depends crucially on its being fictional.”. (shrink)

In this paper a hybrid model of argument from analogy is presented that combines argumentation schemes and story schemes. One premise of the argumentation scheme for argument from analogy in the model claims that one case is similar to another. Story schemes are abstract representations of stories (narratives, explanations) based on common knowledge about how sequences of actions and events we are familiar with can normally be expected to unfold. Story schemes are used (a) to model similarity between two cases, (...) and (2) as the basis of evidence to support the similarity premise of an argument from analogy. Four examples of argument from analogy are used to test the theory. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I provide the logical foundation for a solution to the mind-body problem, a solution which is directly based upon Wilfrid Sellars' analogical theory of thought and sensation. Chapters I-IV are devoted to an interpretation, analysis, and constructive criticism of Sellars' notions of the inner thought episode and the sensing state. My analysis is offered in support of three general contentions: I argue that the postulation of inner thought episodes and sensing states is necessary for adequate explanations of (...) agent behavior; I hope to show how the analogical theory of inner thought episodes and sensing states actually generates a legitimate problem concerning the relationship between the mental and the physical; and I demonstrate the importance of the notion of analogy in philosophical theory construction. I suggest that the role of analogy provides the key for the solution to the mind-body problem. ;Chapter One is essentially introductory in nature. I offer an interpretation and reconstruction of Sellars' illustrative story entitled "The Jonesean Myth" . The "Myth" provides a suitable representation of Sellars' overall philosophy of mind. But perhaps more importantly, the "Myth" is a paradigm example of what I shall call the analogical method of inquiry, a method employed for the introduction of the notions of inner thought episodes and sensing states. In brief, I want to show how the "Myth" provides the logical basis for a theory adequate for explanations of the mental activity of agents. ;Chapters II and III are closely related. In Chapter II, I present a theory of linguistic representation which will serve as the analogical base for the introduction and characterization of the inner thought episode. In Chapter III, I develop the notion of the inner thought episode , and I examine its nature and status as a theoretical construct. Chapters II and III are thus related by the Sellarsian thesis that the concept of mental representation is to be understood in terms which apply, primarily, to characterizations of the features of the linguistic framework presented in Chapter II. ;In Chapter IV, I argue, again following Sellars' lead, that the explication of the notion of the perceptual thought episode requires the introduction of a second distinct sort of inner episode, namely, that of the sense experience or sensing state. The argument offered in Chapter IV is designed to show that sensing states are theoretical constructs, the reference to which is essential for explanations concerning the occurrence and nature of perceptual representations. Sensing states are introduced and characterized by an analogical extension of families of predicates which are suitable for the identification and description of ordinary physical objects . ;In Chapter V, I propose a solution to the mind-body problem, as the latter is generated by the analysis given to the thought episode and the sensing state . In general terms, I argue that any purported solution to the mind-body problem must provide an explanatory basis for agent behavior, and it is for this reason that I reject "reductionistic" theories of mind of the kind represented by logical behaviorism, type-identity physicalism, and Turing Machine functionalism. My solution, instead, involves a commitment to what I shall call token physicalism, a thesis which is contingent upon the development of a theory of neurophysiology which is rich enough to capture, in an analogical sense, both the intentional features of the thought episode, and the occurrent-like qualities which are exemplified by the sensing state. (shrink)

This paper defends a constructive interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason, which is built in analogy with an experimental construction that Kant believes to characteristic of chemistry. I also argue for a way to reconcile the methodological perspective of the constructivist method with that of transcendental reflection. I therefore provide a constructive explanation for what Kant describes as being pure reason and the argument of the transcendental deduction. I propose to frame the different perspectives in such a way that (...) the experimental construction is the ratio cognoscendi of pure reason, while pure reason is the ratio essendi of the experimental construction. O’Neill (1989, 2015) is one of the most important scholars that have argued for a constructivist reading of the Critique of pure reason (CPR). In this paper I develop and explore new aspects of this line of interpretation. One of the main criticisms raised against constructivist readings of Kant’s philosophy is an alleged commitment to subjectivism or voluntarism (cf. Kleingeld & Willaschek 2019). This concern led some scholars to rename their position as constitutivist instead (Korsgaard 2009; Sensen 2013, 2017; Formosa 2011). Constitutivism, is intended to be a sort of constructivism capable of avoiding voluntarism. However, it becomes difficult, sometimes, to differentiate between the constitutivist and foundationalist positions, which are based on transcendental reflection and imply a sort of realist perspective on reason. The same preoccupation applies to the constructivist interpretation of the CPR. In order to deal with this issue, the following questions must be addressed: how can constructivism justify the necessity and universality of transcendental principles of pure reason without compromising the normative and procedural aspects of the construction? How to reconcile arguments based on the analysis of representations and faculties with a constructivist procedure? Or even, how may transcendental reflection, as a view of the possibility of a priori cognition, be rendered compatible with a constructive procedure? This paper is divided into three sections, followed by brief final remarks. The first section outlines the main characteristics of constructivism and relates them to Kant’s positions about the nature of philosophy and its method. The second part argues for a type of experimental constructivism that might serve as a guiding analogy to understand the method underlying the CPR. Thirdly, I will show how the transcendental subject and pure reason are derived from this experimental construction. The conclusion briefly points out some advantages of this position. (shrink)

This paper presents a theory of reasoning with evidence in order to determine the facts in a criminal case. The focus is on the process of proof, in which the facts of the case are determined, rather than on related legal issues, such as the admissibility of evidence. In the literature, two approaches to reasoning with evidence can be distinguished, one argument-based and one story-based. In an argument-based approach to reasoning with evidence, the reasons for and against the occurrence of (...) an event, e.g., based on witness testimony, are central. In a story-based approach, evidence is evaluated and interpreted from the perspective of the factual stories as they may have occurred in a case, e.g., as they are defended by the prosecution. In this paper, we argue that both arguments and narratives are relevant and useful in the reasoning with and interpretation of evidence. Therefore, a hybrid approach is proposed and formally developed, doing justice to both the argument-based and the narrative-based perspective. By the formalization of the theory and the associated graphical representations, our proposal is the basis for the design of software developed as a tool to make sense of the evidence in complex cases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Storytelling and Narrative Knowing:An Examination of the Epistemic Benefits of Well-Told StoriesSarah E. Worth (bio)IntroductionPeople love to tell stories. When something scary, or funny, or out of the ordinary happens, we cannot wait to tell others about it. If it was really funny, etc., we tell the story repeatedly, embellishing as we see fit, shortening or lengthening it as the circumstances prescribe. When people are bad storytellers we tend (...) not to pay as close attention to their stories; our minds drift, and we hope for a swift conclusion. We tend not to remember those stories as well as the ones that were carefully constructed and skillfully delivered. Storytelling is one of our primary forms of communication with other people. Narrativity is the principle way that human beings order their experience in time. It is also one of the primary ways that humans make coherent sense out of seemingly unrelated sequences of events. Thus, an account of how this ordering works is essential to understanding one of the many ways of knowing used by humans, one that has been widely unaccounted for, I believe. What I will argue in this article is that reading, telling, and hearing well-constructed narratives are not just idle pastimes that we have created for entertainment purposes or even as a mere means of communication. Rather, there are epistemological benefits to reading, hearing, and telling well-constructed narratives. In particular, by practicing what I call narrative reasoning, we develop this skill, just as by practicing discursive reasoning we develop discursive reasoning skills. In turn, we develop an enhanced reasoning ability that arises from narrative reasoning and narrative meaning construction. Ultimately, I will argue that those who are able to develop the capacity to reason narratively will be able to have a more comprehensive understanding of the human experience. [End Page 42]Defining NarrativeTo begin, I will go into some detail about what I mean when I talk about narratives since the reasoning skills that will ultimately come from engaging with narratives will be related to the way that we come to understand and make sense of them. Since I do not intend to posit a theory of narrative, I will talk about what constitutes narrativity and what sort of features contribute to increasing the narrativity of a story. To begin, narrative is generally the representation of an event or sequence of events. It is closely tied to description, but it goes beyond description. "My cat has fleas" is a description of a state of affairs. "My cat was bitten by a flea" is a narrative about my cat, which includes a description. Some theorists (such as Barthes and Rimmon-Kenan) argue that a narrative must consist of more than one event or state of affairs in order to be minimally considered a narrative. For my purposes, the change in states of affairs from one to another will be essential for understanding the cognitive aspects that can be gained from engaging with narrative. Although I do not advocate a minimal requirement for something to be considered a narrative, at least two, if not multiple, states of affairs increase narrativity significantly. Narratives also have a unified subject and some relatively easily understood temporal structure. Although many narratives do not order all of their events sequentially, good narratives will have a temporal order that can be gleaned by its reader.1An annal might be something that is temporally ordered and likely have more than two events or states of affairs, and for this reason it might be put into a category of "story form." The primary principle of organization of an annal, however, is merely a temporal list of events. It cannot count as a full-fledged narrative since it may be a temporal list of events that has no unified subject. For example,A: "The Space shuttle Challenger explodes in 1988, the Berlin wall comes down in 1989, there is a massacre at Srebenica, Bosnia in 1995."B: "The Space Shuttle Columbia blows up upon reentry to Earth; the Space Shuttle Challenger explodes upon take off."A is a temporally ordered list of events and is an annal; B, however, is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 37.1 (2004) 42-71 [Access article in PDF] Narrative as Argument in Indian Philosophy: The Astavakra Gita as Multivalent Narrative Scott R. Stroud Department of Philosophy Temple University Indian philosophy has often been described as radically different in nature than Western philosophy due to its frequent use of narrative structure. By employing poetic elements in their use of language, such texts attempt to convey deep metaphysical truths (...) and philosophical positions about reality that are in many cases quite different from Western ideas (Babbili 1997). Often, these ways of conveying truths are an integral part of that truth. One particularly useful form is narrative, taking instantiations such as a dialogue between characters. Philosophical dialogues such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Astavakra Gita (also known as the Astavakra Samhita ) use a portrayed conversation involving a guru or deity to convey didactic lessons and values to the receptive audience, both ancient and modern. As texts such as the Bhagavad Gita gain in popularity and circulation in the Western world (Minor 1982; Paine 1998; Sharpe 1985), philosophical and rhetorical inquiry must be extended to explain how these texts function in an argumentative philosophical context.Stroud (2002a, 2002b) has advanced the idea that such ancient Indian narratives argue through the use of contradictions and conflicting value structures;1 he labels such texts as multivalent narratives since their use of contradictory value structures compel audience members to reconstruct the narrative's message and allow for the acceptance of novel views. Multivalent narratives are to be distinguished from polysemic narratives (Fiske 1986) in that the latter concern different audience members finding a preferred position from the ambiguous story. Polysemic narratives involve the difference in meaning of the same story to different auditors. Condit criticizes this notion of polysemic narratives and advances her own concept of polyvalent narratives. The concept of a polyvalent narrative involves different auditors understanding the same story in similar ways, but differing in how they evaluate its message. Condit's research with a popular television [End Page 42] show and two students from radically different backgrounds on abortion finds that they understood what occurred in a very similar fashion; they differed in that they "disagree[d] about the valuation of those denotations to such a degree that they produce[d] noticeably different interpretations" (1989, 106). Thus, the auditors differ as to their response to a certain story and how it treats their own cherished values. Stroud (2002a) provides a thorough justification as to why the concepts of polysemic and polyvalent narratives do not capture what can be called multivalent narratives. The important factor in distinguishing these three concepts is that the third involves contradictions at the level of values within a text and the reader's necessitated activity of trying to synthesize or reconcile such contradictions. It is this activity that is the hallmark of multivalent narratives.This employment of multivalent narrative offers a challenge to familiar Western conceptions of argumentative discourse and demands further investigation. This study explores the ways a particular text, the Astavakra Gita, argues its philosophical positions to its audience of potential "pupils."2 Using the insights provided by theories of narrative and reader-response theory, I will argue that this text advances its claims not through overt syllogism or validity claim redemption, but through textual indeterminacy between the audience's disposition and the foregrounded theme of non-individuation in the text. This tension, increased by certain textual devices, results in consistency building by the audience, which enables the transcendence of these two viewpoints (reader and text); it is this experience, not claim, that the Astavakra Gita seems to be advancing to any given audience.In order to explore this interpretation of this text and its argumentative relationship to an audience, insights from both literary studies and rhetorical theory must be used in laying a foundation. The work of Wolfgang Iser (1980, 1989, 1993) and Walter Fisher (1987) will assume roles of particular importance in this endeavor. Iser's theory of aesthetic response provides a useful description of the phenomenological process of reading such a... (shrink)

[Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of generalizations, (...) not just generalize correctly to individual cases; (2) The need to be able to match two or more complex short-term information structures, to enable rapid generalization from recent examples rather than from long-term memories; (3) The need to represent and reason with anomalous combinations of concepts; (4) The need to perform embedded reasoning. This presents special problems for systems using non-concatenative representations (as in mainstream connectionist approaches). We also touched on vague quantification in attitude report complements. Neither this topic nor that of analogies between short-term structures (point 2) has been adequately addressed in the symbolic framework, let alone in connectionism. -/- The opportunities and problems covered are put forward as things worth being optimistic about or pessimistic about, respectively. They are not put forward as decisive arguments for or against connectionism. The hope is that this chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the connectionist/symbolist gap by presenting some unusual issues and by throwing new light on some well known ones. (shrink)

Can fictional narration yield knowledge in a way that depends crucially on its being fictional? This is the hard question of literary cognitivism. It is unexceptional that knowledge can be gained from fictional literature in ways that are not dependent on its fictionality (e.g., the science in science fiction). Sometimes fictional narratives are taken to exhibit the structure of suppositional argument, sometimes analogical argument. Of course, neither structure is unique to narratives. The thesis of literary cognitivism would be supported if (...) some novels exhibit a cogent and special argument structure restricted to fictional narratives. I contend that this is the case for a kind of transcendental argument. The reason is the inclusion and pattern of occurrence of the predicate ‘believable’ in the schema. Believability with respect to fictional stories is quite a different thing than it is with respect to nonfictional stories or anything else. (shrink)

This article aims to examine the relationship between image and narrative by means of Peirce’s first trichotomy of qualisign-sinsign-legisign or, for the purposes of the current argument, image-diagram-metaphor. It is argued that narrative, as an extended metaphor, can be examined in three modes: in the image; schematically, in the imagination; and allegorically or in a thought experiment, through hypothetic interpretation. The article outlines two kinds of diagrammatic reasoning emphasized by Peirce: corollarial deduction in which the image is ‘literally seen’ and (...) the reasoning steps are manifest in its conclusion; and theorematic deduction where the conclusion in a diagram is subject to a hypothesis which transforms the image into something new. Demonstrating the breadth of diagrammatic reasoning with reference to the 2018 film, The Shape of Water, the article seeks to explore how allegory and diagram are mutually cooperative, based on three ontological modes: the expressive, the cognitive, and the symbolic. Its primary focus, then, is not so much on the story events of the narrative, as the way that they are visualized and characterized as the fairy story unfolds. It is suggested that the interpreting activity involved in allegory and diagram ties interpretation to metacognition, ultimately (re)recognizing the image in The Shape of Water in an attempt to ascertain the meaning of love. (shrink)

In the 1980s, Pollock’s work on default reasons started the quest in the AI community for a formal system of defeasible argumentation. The main goal of this paper is to provide a logic of structured defeasible arguments using the language of justification logic. In this logic, we introduce defeasible justification assertions of the type t : F that read as “t is a defeasible reason that justifies F”. Such formulas are then interpreted as arguments and their acceptance semantics is given (...) in analogy to Dung’s abstract argumentation framework semantics. We show that a large subclass of Dung’s frameworks that we call “warranted” frameworks is a special case of our logic in the sense that Dung’s frameworks can be obtained from justification logic-based theories by focusing on a single aspect of attacks among justification logic arguments and Dung’s warranted frameworks always have multiple justification logic instantiations called “realizations”. We first define a new justification logic that relies on operational semantics for default logic. One of the key features that is absent in standard justification logics is the possibility to weigh different epistemic reasons or pieces of evidence that might conflict with one another. To amend this, we develop a semantics for “defeaters”: conflicting reasons forming a basis to doubt the original conclusion or to believe an opposite statement. This enables us to formalize non-monotonic justifications that prompt extension revision already for normal default theories. Then we present our logic as a system for abstract argumentation with structured arguments. The format of conflicting reasons overlaps with the idea of attacks between arguments to the extent that it is possible to define all the standard notions of argumentation framework extensions. Using the definitions of extensions, we establish formal correspondence between Dung’s original argumentation semantics and our operational semantics for default theories. One of the results shows that the notorious attack cycles from abstract argumentation cannot always be realized as justification logic default theories. (shrink)

Stories can be powerful argumentative vehicles, and they are often used to present arguments from analogy, most notably as parables, fables or allegories where the story invites the hearer to infer an important claim of the argument. Case Based Reasoning in Law has many similar features: the current case is compared to previously decided cases, and in case the similarity between the previous and current cases is deemed sufficient, a similar conclusion can be drawn for the current case. In this (...) article, we want to take a further step towards computationally modelling the connection between stories and argumentation in analogical reasoning. We show how story schemes can be used to investigate and determine story similarity, and how the point of a story – that is, the conclusion that the storyteller intends the hearer to draw – can be likened to the ratio decidendi in a legal case. Finally, we present some formal tools for modelling stories based on computational models of practical reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power: Speech Presentation and Latin LiteratureEllen OliensisAndrew Laird. Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power: Speech Presentation and Latin Literature. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. xx + 358 pp. Cloth, $85.Prospective readers should not be put off by the title of this ambitious book. Though "speech presentation" (the use of direct discourse [DD], free indirect discourse [FID], etc.) may seem a (...) rather narrow and technical topic, Laird makes a persuasive case for its manifold significance. And while he foregrounds "Latin literature," Laird ranges freely across centuries and genres, drawing on texts as diverse as the Hittite SongofUllikummi, Sannazaro's DepartuVirginis, and a 1994 story in the DailyTelegraph. The result is a thoughtful and engaging study from which readers of very different interests and stripes will be able to profit. Three chapters on the theory of narrative representation and speech presentation are followed by another three exploring representational strategies in (mostly Latin) historiography, epic, and the novel; a final chapter treats the speeches of divine messengers in epic as "allegories of representation." The book is framed by a brief introduction and conclusion, the latter capped by a suggestive coda pointing to the multiple lines of research, across various disciplines, which might be opened up by a more scrupulous consideration of speech presentation.In the introduction, Laird outlines the benefits, practical and theoretical, of focusing on speech presentation: "First, [speech presentation] can throw light on the themes and stylistic features of particular texts. Second, functions of speech [End Page 596] presentation bear on broader concerns including form and content, representation, genre, ideology, and intertextuality" (xv). These claims are amply justified in the ensuing chapters. Laird's theoretical orientation generates an abundance of local insights. He suggests that Tacitus' contrasting introductions to the speeches of Calgacus and Agricola--the distancing locutusfertur versus the confident itadisseruit (Agr. 29.4, 33.1)--help differentiate barbarian from Roman by implying "that Agricola's oration possesses a greater ontological stature than Calgacus'" (126); that Encolpius' exploitation of what Laird dubs "angled narration of dialogue" (reserving DD for his interlocutors' speech and ID for his own) produces the effect of narratorial transparency in the Cena (217-20); that the use of direct discourse for Mercury's message and indirect for Fama's in Aeneid 4 "enhances the essential contrast between the nature of the two messengers" (272). In one of his boldest discussions (192-205), Laird reviews the unanswered speeches in the Aeneid and concludes that Virgil's epic is far more rigid than previous epics in associating speech with authority and dutiful silence with subordination (Laird interestingly contrasts Homeric epic, which proclaims this hierarchy but doesn't practice it with anything like Virgil's consistency); Laird goes on to speculate that this strong linkage of speech with authority also applies to Virgil's own epic discourse, which (like Aeneas' narration in books 2 and 3) is delivered to readers who are silent or even silenced.Occasionally, the marriage of theory and interpretation founders. For example, Laird's account of the multiple literary echoes in Encolpius's seaside soliloquy (Satyricon 81.1-82.1, discussed at 221-24) shows little trace of the theoretical self-consciousness displayed in his earlier remarks on the ideological character of intertextuality and its proximity to speech presentation. And the argument that the opening sequence of the Aeneid is designed to entice the reader into Virgil's "realist" fiction (157-64) rests on some unconvincing claims (e.g., that Aeneas' first speech "begins with a prayer" addressed to "the gods, or even the poem's audience" [162], and that Juno's first soliloquy has "the poem's audience or readers" as "her first addressees" [164]). Elsewhere, Laird suggests that Aeneas' parenthetical eloquaransileam? (Aen. 3.39) "could be FID conveying his own doubt and hesitation at the time of the incident he is describing" (182-83); but surely the question makes sense only if it is attached, not to the narrated past (where the relevant question would be "shall I keep pulling on this uncanny tree?") but to the present of narration.Although Laird, an astute reader, has much to teach us about... (shrink)

A logic is a doctrine of the logos, that is, of meaningful discourse; hence the first thing we expect from it is an account of what makes the logos meaningful — of what a meaning is. There is no single such doctrine or account: it is part of the immense richness of meaningful discourse that we can shift back and forth between several logics — several organized ways of reasoning, of providing reasons or grounds for our claims. Building on previous (...) work on Hegel's dialectical logic, the author here identifies three distinct logics simultaneously in play in our conversations. Analytic logic structures its organization of discourse around negation, contraries, and hence arguments forcing a conclusion to follow (under threat of inconsistency) from some premises. Dialectical logic's main tool is the construction of narratives, hence the attempted incorporation of interlocutors within one's own story. The third option, here labeled gradual logic, sees sorites (which are recalcitrant anomalies for the analytic approach) as ideal cases, since the bleeding of a predicate into an alleged contrary points the way to reaching an agreement among initially conflicting parties: to them eventually coming to regard themselves as stressing different aspects of one and the same thing. (shrink)

I first ask what it is to make up a story. In order to answer that question, I give existence and identity conditions for stories. I argue that a story exists whenever there is some narrative content that has intentionally been made accessible. I argue that stories are abstract types, individuated by the conditions that must be met by something in order to be a properly formed token of the type. However, I also argue that the truth of our story (...) identity attributions---sentences like, "Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is the same story as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings''---are relative to their context of use, so that the same attribution of identity might be true in one context or false in another because of a change in what's being said about the works in the differing contexts. From those existence and identity conditions, I draw the conclusions that story is best understood to be a phase sortal of some abstract types, and that what it is to make up a story is to identify a type of narrative representation and its content, such that the content is neither based on actual events nor on the content of other stories to an objectionable degree. In chapter 2, I ask what it is for a story to be complete. I argue for the general meta-thesis I call "Completion Pluralism", viz. that there are many kinds of artwork completeness, many corresponding senses of 'complete', and no kind of artwork completeness is objectively more important than any other. I give a pair of arguments against those who would deny Completion Pluralism, endorsing Completion Monism instead. First, I show how Monistic analyses of the one (or one most important) kind of artwork completeness fail. I also show that each Monistic theory's failure is contingent on the assumption of Completion Monism: the denial of Completion Monism dissolves each argument against the extensional adequacy of extant theories of artwork completeness. I argue that this is all best explained by the idea that Completion Pluralism is true. Second, I argue that Completion Pluralism fits best with the variety of interests that we bring to questions about artwork completeness: there is no single or overriding concern we have when we want to know whether an artwork is complete. We shouldn't expect completeness to be a single sort of thing, then. I show how to put Completion Pluralism to work by identifying different kinds of artwork completeness in artworks. Finally, I introduce a new kind of completeness particular to stories, what I call "narrative completion", and show how it's distinct from other kinds of completeness discussed. In chapter 3, I argue that the distinction between fictional and non-fictional stories is the degree to which stories are made-up. In short, a fictional story is a made-up story. I first provide a couple desiderata for thinking about theories of fiction, then show how the two most popular extant theories of fiction---the prop theory and the genre theory---fall short in meeting one or more of those desiderata to some extent. I then show how the theory that fictions are made-up stories better meets the desiderata, using my account of what it is to make up a story from chapter 1. I turn to explicitly ontological matters in chapter 4. Addressing the question of what stories are, I show that both the theses that they are eternal and immutable and that they are created and historical seem plausible for independent reasons. I discuss a schema of an argument some philosophers who hold to the latter view (those I call "Creationists") attempt to give for their view. However, I show how those who hold to the view that stories are eternal and immutable ("Platonists") can account for all the same appearances as the Creationists, usually at least as well and sometimes with a better accounting. Similar, deductive arguments for Platonism will give rise to similar responses from the Creationist, however. In the end, then, the style of argument in particular is unlikely to advance the discussion much. Finally, I attempt to advance the discussion by building an abductive case for Platonism. First, I vindicate a particular metaontological methodology for the debate at hand, a methodology that allows for "revisionary" outcomes in our ontologies of art objects. Second, I build a case for Platonism by arguing that it best explains a number of features of stories discussed in the previous chapters. Moreover, I argue that Creationism is committed to an implausible account of how some abstract objects come into existence. Given the combination of those facts, I argue that we should prefer Platonism to Creationism. (shrink)

Writing, the exigency of writing: no longer the writing that has always (through a necessity in no way avoidable) been in the service of the speech or thought that is called idealist (that is to say, moralizing), but rather the writing that through its own slowly liberated force (the aleatory force of absence) seems to devote itself solely to itself as something that remains without identity, and little by little brings forth possibilities that are entirely other: an anonymous, distracted, deferred, (...) and dispersed way of being in relation, by which everything is brought into question – and first of all the idea of God, of the Self, of the Subject, then of Truth and the One, then finally the idea of the Book and the Work so that this writing (understood in its enigmatic rigor), far from having the Book as its goal rather signals its end: a writing that could be said to be outside discourse, outside language. – Maurice Blanchot ( The Infinite Conversation , xi) The Compendium * Beginning with the idea and practice of writing, and moving to the subject or self, then to truth and the One, and arriving at the Book and the Work, Blanchot’s words reflect the trajectory of the following work of writing. True to the embeddedness of the subject in the work of writing, the term “Compendium” has been a metonym for me over the past few years as I have thought about the concept of totality alongside its expression in figures such as the One, the Whole, or the All. In the following I aim to share some of the content of this metonym, and to enrich it by making some distinctions. 1 Here the term “Compendium” will refer to a concept of totality that is ontological (pertaining to being, and the copula) and also textual (pertaining to the symbolic, and the signifier-signified relationship). The Compendium is a figure for thinking the world as a Book, in the broadest sense—an approach to reality that is by no means new, but one that is due for renewal. 2 In partial answer to the question of the Compendium we will say that the word ‘Compendium’ stands in for expressions which seek to totalize, or concepts which seek to approach the concept of ‘everything,’ particularly when these expressions are bound up in the question of the Book (both the book as a physical object and the Book as a metaphysical figure: a way of thinking about the work in and of writing). The question of the Compendium is strongly associated with the physical and metaphysical form of the Book, like the mysterious and symbolic books which are opened in the Biblical book of Revelation, the book of life and the book of death, which together constitute an important couplet. 3 Parataxis & Hypotaxis There are two helpful distinctions that will bring us closer to an answer to the question “What is a Compendium?” The first distinction is between two figures in and for writing: parataxis and hypotaxis . Typically paired in contrast to one another as literary techniques, with parataxis indicating a side-by-side placement of textual elements and hypotaxis referring to subordinate arrangements of textual elements, the two figures can be understood as having a philosophical significance in addition to their practical function as devices for writers. For us these two terms will remain between philosophical theory and writing practice, and serve as a perspective for our writing and creation of texts. Here I take texts to refer to anything from the concrete written words in a book, to the ontological text of the world that we experience. Parataxis , as a figural way of thinking about the ontological structure of texts, refers to texts which are tightly woven and interdependent – texts within which each sentence bears the weight of the entire work. Parataxis often involves repetition, great density, and fragility. One of the best examples of this sort of text is Theodor Adorno’s posthumous magnum opus , Aesthetic Theory . In addition to the text itself, the translation history of the book may also help us to better understand parataxis and its relation to hypotaxis . The final published version of Aesthetic Theory , in German, was a text that Adorno intended to revise and rewrite, but this intention was never realized because of his untimely death. Where the German text of Aesthetic Theory certainly exemplifies the concept of parataxis , the first English edition took this densely woven text and carved Adorno’s lengthy paragraphs and lengthy sentences into manageable ‘bite-sized’ pieces of English text. The first translator took further liberty and inserted headings and new paragraph breaks where there were none in the original. Aesthetic Theory was eventually retranslated by Robert Hullot-Kentor and is now available in a form that is much more faithful to the original work. 4 The pertinent idea that this translation history points to is the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis . Where parataxis describes texts which are repetitive, densely woven, and often fragile, hypotaxis describes texts which are hierarchical and in which the primary relation is linear – the latter of which is very similar to the first English translation of Aesthetic Theory . On the other hand, the original German text that Adorno wrote was very dense, often repetitive, and contained long sections of text unbroken by paragraphs or headings. This example of parataxis was then turned towards hypotaxis through the initial translation which took a text that was, in many ways, nonhierarchical and nonlinear, and artificially subjected it to a hierarchy that was not its own (and here I take the word of Fredric Jameson who comments on the two translations in a note at the beginning of his book Late Marxism ). 5 The point here is not about translation, but rather the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis precisely as they are figures for discourse, written or otherwise. The concept of parataxis looks far more postmodern and rhizomic than the concept of hypotaxis which remains very modern and arborescent. This is a more figural way of talking about the distinction. However, if we wanted to take a more precise and analytical approach we could say that on the level of form parataxis involves a relationship between sentences and paragraphs in which each part bears an equally crushing responsibility to present the whole content of the text. As well, on the level of content, parataxis requires that each concept in a work take on the full conceptual weight of the total work. Continuing the analysis, we could say that parataxis describes texts in which there is no (or very little) linear or causal move from antecedent to consequent, whether in content or form. Instead, parataxis describes texts which weave together concepts via conjugations or associations. The concept of hypotaxis , on the other hand, requires that texts submit themselves to hierarchy, one example of which is logical argumentation. The contingency of the conclusion upon premises in hypotaxis is certainly distinct from the repetition, re-presentation, and conjugation of concepts in parataxis , and I think that this is evident in the difference between the writing styles prevalent in contemporary Analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. It is not the case that the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis absolutely corresponds with the writing styles of Continental and Analytic philosophy (respectively). There are thinkers who take exception to this pattern, such as Badiou’s more formal approach in the discourse of Continental philosophy to give one example. However, when Analytic philosophy takes its writing lessons from the sciences, and seeks to do philosophy via the clean linear move from antecedent to consequent, then I think that Analytic philosophy writes with hypotaxis in mind. On the other hand, when Continental (particularly German and French) philosophy takes its writing lessons from narrative or poetry then Continental philosophy writes with parataxis in mind. It is not fair to say that all those writing Continental philosophy are looking to narrative and poetry for stylistic direction, just as it is not the case that all those writing Analytic philosophy have mathematics and science as their writing format, however there are some striking ways in which the differing epistemologies of Continental and Analytic philosophy encourage writing with parataxis and hypotaxis in mind (respectively). For some, writing with parataxis or hypotaxis in mind is a conscious decision and a product of stylistic self-consciousness, and for others it is an unconscious discursive and epistemic requirement that must be met in order to be involved in a particular discourse. Before moving on to our second distinction, and then an examination of the question of the Book, it is important to point out that both totality and figurations like the One, the Whole, and the All, come out of very human desires to totalize or to actualize our being-towards-totality. The relationship between identity and totality then can be construed, with Heidegger in mind, as striving toward wholeness, completion, or fulfillment, each of which is a quality of compendia. 6 Compilation & Selection The first distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis pertains to both form and content, and to both the mechanics of writing and the ideas to which writing refers. The second distinction pertains to both as well. In the process of writing and in the process of perception as well, there is a tension between compilation and selection . To begin with, in the work of theory-writing there is compilation, and this is because writing theory requires a broad perspective and certain measure of totalization. On the other hand, writing theory requires that the writer select an idea or a combination of ideas to individuate out of a radical and infinite multiplicity of identities and combinations. The concern here is not primarily for the writing of a theory about a specific idea, like a secondary work or a reference text. But rather the concern is with the writing of grand theories: Marx and Marxism, Derrida and Deconstruction, Husserl and Phenomenology, Sartre and Existentialism, Saussure and Structuralism —each of which strives along a trajectory towards being all-encompassing, whether it intends to or not. Today, we could even say that Speculative Realism has embarked on this journey, and perhaps now we could say that the discourse of Speculative Realism has reached the inevitable point after which a grand theory leaves the hands of its writer or writers and becomes a possession of the collective consciousness of the academy, or (perhaps now) the mass consciousness of the blogosphere—and this is a true pharmakon , a poison and a cure, a blessing and a curse. 7 When we write theory, whether the scope is that of a grand theory or a particular theory, we write in the tension between compilation (making good on the desire to be all encompassing) and selection (being required to decide and discern and to judge what is included in the work and what is deleted or appended or abridged or given over to ellipses). Generally speaking, the work of theory-writing often comes out of a desire to totalize, that is, to develop a theory of everything that is able to apprehend new experiences and ideas while still remaining whole. I grant that this is not a universal desire, and that not everyone who sits down to write a work (or book) of theory does so because of their will-to-totality, but it remains that this drive to totalize does condition a great many writers of theory (especially those who seek to develop grand theories like those mentioned previously). At the beginning of his book of interviews, Between Existentialism and Marxism , Sartre is quoted as saying, after completing the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason : “I no longer feel the need to make long digressions in my books, as if I were forever chasing after my own philosophy. It will now be deposited in little coffins, and I will feel completely emptied and at peace—as I felt after Being and Nothingness . A feeling of emptiness: a writer is fortunate if he can attain such a state. For when one has nothing to say, one can say everything .” 8 This is where our two initial distinctions come to bear on the being-towards-totality as it is expressed in the concrete practice of writing: the first being between parataxis and hypotaxis , and the second being between compilation and selection. Where this second distinction is concerned there is a certain paradox at play given that selection is inescapable, and compilation is unachievable. Selection is inescapable (with the figure of the Compendium in mind) because, even when the imperative to compile is followed to excruciating lengths, selection still has the last word. This is why the Compendium is a figure rather than some material thing that can actually be accomplished or actualized. No matter how far one goes along with the will-to-archive and the will-to-compile, it is only ever a question of minimizing selection and never eliminating it. This leads to the second point, which is that total compilation is unachievable. The closest thing to total compilation that we have before us is the ontological and textual fabric of the world. Even in the case of the world, compilation cannot be enacted in a total fashion because of the need to include both the sphere of the actual and the sphere of the possible or potential. This as another way in which compilation is always-already selection, and further evidence that total compilation is practically impossible. Discursive Figuration and Total Writing Rather than figuration referring to a figure of speech or an image, here the term points to a way in which to think about the work of writing, both the work put into writing, and the work that is the result of writing: the finished yet incomplete final piece. As figures or figurations, the Book and the Compendium are ways of thinking about the work of writing and the human desire for the wholeness, completion, and fulfillment that are made manifest in the completed form of the book (whether a published or printed or saved document put to rest by the author). These two figures bear more strongly upon works that seek to be all-encompassing, and works that strive towards expressions of totality such as the One, the Whole, or the All. Moving on to the topic of the subtitle, and on a more prescriptive note, I would say that there is more hope for theory-writing to be found in parataxis than hypotaxis . Part of the reason for this claim is the poststructuralist critique of hierarchies, and yet another part is the compelling line of thinking called “weak thought” (in theology by John D. Caputo, and in philosophy by Gianni Vattimo, among others). 9 The consequences of these two convictions are such that if one is to strongly assert the truth of a grand theory without leaving the realm of hierarchy-critique and weak thought, then one must write paradoxically with parataxis in mind, and in so doing write weakly and non-hierarchically. This does not mean avoiding a sort of topography or topology when writing theory, rather it means avoiding both subjugation and oppression in thought by pursuing a nonviolent sort of ontology. In order to do this, theory writing does not present itself as an exercise in logical analysis where one mechanically moves from a set of premises (via contingency) to the inevitable conclusion (via necessity). Instead, theory approaches the idea of a Compendium. Given that the figural Compendium places parataxis and compilation above hypotaxis and selection, then the question becomes: is placing one part of a binary term before another not just another way of selecting, or another expression of hypotaxis ? Counter to the urge to resign oneself to the reign of selection, with some qualification one can nonetheless write without deciding whether selection and hypotaxis should be subservient to compilation and parataxis (which is to say that writing-without-decision is somewhere between and beyond possibility and impossibility). This dilemma can be disarmed by stating that theory writing is not about primacy, and not about having-decided-beforehand, both stylistically and also where content is concerned. This is the paradox of writing: always striving along a trajectory ( telos ) towards totality via parataxis and compilation, but always being drawn back to finitude and making selections, and placing one idea before another with hypotaxis in mind. In light of this paradox, the question of the Compendium as a figure for discourse and a figural Book has resonance with Jacques Derrida’s essay on Edmund Jabès’ Book of Questions , found in his Writing and Difference . The Question of the Book “Little by little the book will finish me.” 10 Derrida quotes Jabès, and proceeds to outline the reflexive relationship between the author of the book and the book itself, each of which are subjected to the other through a sort of chiasmus, both ontological and textual (not that the two are entirely separable). The Book, for Derrida like Blanchot in the introductory quotation, “infinitely reflects itself” and “develops as a painful questioning of its own possibility”, and in light of this we can draw an association with the painful tension between the practical reality of selection and the ideal trajectory of compilation. 11 This tension in writing, between the will to total compilation and the necessity of abridgment, is an ontological tension between part and whole just as it is a textual tension between signifier and signified. The ontological tension in writing that Derrida expresses in his essay on Jabès is between everything and nothing – a contradiction which Derrida finds in Jabès’ Book of Questions and also in the divine, in God. When one writes between compilation and selection one writes towards totality, and here we can follow Derrida who states that the lapse in signification, presumably in the signifier-signified discrepancy, is a “ rupture with totality itself” and furthermore that this lapse cannot be rectified through deductive reason or even philosophical discourse. 12 This rupture with totality, found in the troubled relation between signifier and signified, can also tell us a lot about the Book and about writing. Given an understanding of writing as an ontological act that strives towards (but never accomplishes) totality, we can see the written book as the manifested and given body of that striving. Perhaps in other disciplines or even other schools of philosophy there is a cultural climate within which the article is prized above the book, but I am fairly confident, especially when referring to the grand theories of Continental thought, that there is a respect for the book as a uniquely meaningful object capable of apprehending totality. Derrida writes, Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning. This is how it enters into the book. Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is never finite. It always remains suffering and vigilant. 13 Here the vitality of the literal event is compromised by the deadening weight of the concept, and the figure of the Book assists in this lapse of meaning. The Book is a totalizing object, much like the figure of the Compendium, and yet this totalization lacks its final object of completed totality both because the figural Book is necessarily incomplete, and because the physical book is always-already a product of selection. Instead of achieving its end of being a place where everything takes place, it suffers from the lapse of writing, the discrepancy between event and concept. Derrida continues his exposition on Jabès by bringing to light yet another reflexive relation, a reversal of the relationship between the Book and the world. Derrida writes that, for Jabès, “the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book.” 14 In addition to what was stated before, I take figuration to mean that the concepts employed, such as the Book or the Compendium, are not subject to the supposed rigor of analysis that is so prized by Enlightenment or Capitalist realisms. The figure of the Book and the figure of the Compendium cannot be held accountable to standards imported from scientific method, given an understanding that these standards require a concept to be replicable, consistent, falsifiable, measurable, and so on… This is an important point to make, especially in the present atmosphere within which theory must justify itself under conditions that are not its own. Instead of being held to these standards, figuration serves as a way in which to think about writing that leaves thought open to idealistic speculation, imperfect analogies, and most importantly the ever-present gain and loss that occur in the relationship between thought and being. By extension the figural way of addressing writing indulges in enough generalization to accommodate the excess/lack relationship between the ideal form of the Book or the Compendium, and the manifested and given body of a text (as it is practically completed and closed). Here we speak against the hostile atmosphere which would have theory submit itself to hierarchical rigor, rather than Blanchot’s “enigmatic rigor”, by being explicit about the discursive conditions and epistemic conditions under which theory operates. To write with parataxis in mind is, to a certain degree, to write with weakness as one’s methodology (with weak thought being in opposition to hypotaxis and hierarchy as much as weak thought can be in opposition to anything). Rather than asserting the strength of hierarchical theory, and rather than employing antagonistic argumentation with the goal of refutation different discursive and epistemic conditions for theory writing must be cultivated (and these are by no means new). First the critical and theoretical spirit reveals itself as being concerned with the task of complication—especially the complication and critique of binaries, dichotomies, dualities, polarities, paradoxes, parallaxes, hybridities, and especially antinomies. Second, theory positions itself as a sort of showing or revealing, rather than being ultimately focused on coming to full agreement or disagreement. This is where figuration can help theory-writing, both by placing emphasis on teleologies and trajectories (like parataxis and compilation), and by shifting focus away from pure primacy, power, or absolute origin. Figuration then, assists theory writing by placing the concern of theory outside of the concerns of the hard or soft sciences, and into the realm of thought or the idea. To speak of ‘the’ Compendium or ‘the’ Book, here, is to generalize not regarding the perfect form of the Compendium or Book, but to engage speculatively with an abstract idea which remains singular and yet complicated by multiplicity. The question of the Book that Derrida asks through Jabès is a question of everything and nothing, totality and nonbeing, and this question is a concern for writing and a concern for the figure of the Compendium so defined by the tension between compilation and selection, and parataxis and hypotaxis . On the note of nonbeing, we can look to the final page of Derrida’s first essay on Jabès in Writing and Difference and notice the introduction of his neologism, différance (with an ‘a’). Derrida writes: Life negates itself in literature only so that it may survive better. So that it may be better. It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself, and writes itself as différance . Books are always books of life (the archetype would be the Book of Life kept by the God of the Jews) or of afterlife (the archetype would be the Books of the Dead kept by the Egyptians). 15 This introduction of différance into the equation of the Book, alongside ontological affirmation and negation, hearkens back to the discussion of the symbolic lapse earlier in his essay. Differing and deferring, the Book is always a Book of Life and a figure for the intersection of the vital (life) and the total in writing. In a way, the writer of the Book may be someone who lives life, and in another way the writer of the book-as-object may be someone who engages in the act of writing, both practically (by inscribing words on paper, or typing script on a computer) and ontologically or symbolically (by investing their existence and inexistence into a work worthy of the figural Book). In addition to the writer as writer, the writer also serves as an editor, and the editorial role alongside the idea of the Compendium shows the editor to be one who collects and compiles, while being restrained by eventual selection and decision. Beyond this the editor of works and texts, in both the Book and the world, is engaged in a process of inscribing notation—of annotating (on) the Compendium. Eternal commentary is a feature of the textual Compendium, just as open-ended totality describes the ontological Compendium. The writer as writer does not simply write texts, but rather engages in a profoundly ontological act of inscribing their existence into the world, and the writer as editor does not merely annotate or alter texts as they are, but rather comments upon the text of the world. In/Conclusion So as we create texts, and as we write and create theory, let us be and remain attentive to the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book. These two concurrent metonymies are essential for total writing (grand theories, etc.), and may be forgettable for those concerned with fragmentary or hierarchical writing (which are valid in their own right). From the ontological and symbolic text of the world and phenomenological experience, to concrete texts such as books or mixed media, the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book are important for the actualization of the human will to be all-encompassing. The figure of the Compendium teaches writers of theory that the repetition, density, and fragility of parataxis offers a strong sort of weakness which does not become yet another variety of oppressive and hegemonic thought. Rather than write with hypotaxis in mind, subjugating one thought to another via cause and effect or antecedent and consequent, I would hope that theory-writing could guiltlessly indulge in the dialectical and contradictory conjugation of ideas, and take this as a legitimate methodology. Rather than being ashamed of showing resonances or giving way to abridgment or ellipses, it is my own authorial (but not authoritative) conviction that one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the fact that complete totalization is impossible, and one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the worry of violence, for the Book and the Compendium lack their completed object and are ever incomplete trajectories. NOTES * UPDATED 7/19/13: we've updated the HTML version to reflect the (correct) PDF version. Our apologies to the author—eds. 1. I would like extend thanks to Dr. Peter Schwenger of the University of Western Ontario for his comments on this paper and his hospitality as it was presented as a Theory Session at the Centre for Theory and Criticism on October 26th 2012. I would also like to thank Andrew Weiss for conversation and critique. 2. I should clarify my use of the term ‘figure’ at the outset. Given the use of the term by Jean-Francois Lyotard in Discourse, Figure (and also Gilles Deleuze in Francis Bacon ), I should state clearly that my use of the term will not correspond to the term ‘figure’ understood as the representation of an object. Instead, my use of the term ‘figure’ and its variations (‘figural’, ‘figurative’, ‘figuration’) will refer to the illustrative or metaphorical use of the Compendium or the Book as models or ways of thinking about writing and discourse. 3. Cf. Revelations 20:12-15. 4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London & New York: Continuum Press, 1997). 5. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London & New York: Verso, 1990), ix-x. 6. I have written about this concept of being-towards-totality elsewhere in two pieces of writing: the first is called Notes on the Compendium (an unfinished draft) which addresses some very wide theoretical concerns, being structured as a sort of itinerary or archive, and the second is Dialectics Unbound (Punctum Books, 2013) which outlines a concept of totality without the violence of totalization. While these works are more concerned with ontological totality, here I would like to focus on the idea of the Compendium as a textual totality. 7. Cf. Louis Morelle, “Speculative Realism: After Finitude and Beyond, A vade mecum” in Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism . Issue 3 (Brooklyn, New York: Punctum Books, 2012), 241-272. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism . Trans. John Matthews (London & New York: Verso, 1974), 9. 9. Cf. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006). 10. Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” in Writing and Difference . Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 65. 11. Ibid, 65. 12. Ibid, 71. 13. Ibid, 75. 14. Ibid, 76. 15. Ibid, 78. (shrink)

Summary This paper traces a mutually reinforcing set of arguments about the practice of history in the work of J. G. A. Pocock and Paul Ricoeur that responds to challenges posed to the autonomy of selves and their communities raised by both thinkers. It begins with their respective views on language, texts and actions, moves to the construction of narrative and historiography, and concludes with their account of selves and the communities to which they belong. Corresponding to these three considerations (...) are a set of conclusions drawn with different emphases: first, that both texts and acts are potentially open to indefinite and plural interpretations; second, that narrative and historiography are constitutively contested modes of critical discourse continually open to the construction of new meaning; and third, that the contested, capable, narrative self, and the community to which that mediated self belongs, exercises autonomy as an active, responsible, reflective citizen and/or critical historian. It concludes from this study that the limited openness of language, narrative and identity constitutes the promise and risk of history as a contested and affective representation. (shrink)

Many student papers in applied ethics tend to be pure opinion or pure application of one of the traditional moral theories without any serious involvement. In addition, there exists a significant gap between the way professional ethicists write and the way students think about ethical issues. In order to address these two issues, this paper describes two modifications. The first involves beginning a research paper assignment by asking students to write a “moral story,” a story that deals with a serious (...) contemporary moral problem. The second involves shifting away from a model where students are asked to determine the “correct” answer to an ethical problem to a balance scale model of moral reasoning, i.e., one that places the emphasis on determining which arguments have the weightier conclusion. (shrink)

There is a common understanding among logicians today that nonmonotonic types of reasoning, such as defeasible or presumptive, can clearly warrant a rational acceptance of its conclusion. Recognition of the significance and legitimacy of these forms of arguments, which were considered for long as fallacious, is believed to be very recent and many logicians tended to reject any discussions around it within the tradition of logic after Aristotle. In contrast, Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), since medieval age, has recognised the validity and (...) importance of non-deductive forms of reasoning, analysed the structures of such arguments and demonstrated how the conventionally understood fallacies are not essentially fallacies. Qiyās – generally represents analogical reasoning – is taken here as a case of defeasible reasoning in Islamic argumentation. This paper will show through works of two emblematic medieval Muslim jurist-logicians, al-Juwainī and al-Ghazzālī, that understanding the legitimacy and the structure of non-deductive forms of arguments is at the core of Islamic legal theories (usūl al-fiqh), and that they recognised its legitimacy and proposed a dialectical method (jadal) of approaching it. Les logiciens comprennent généralement que les types de raisonnement non monotones peuvent justifier l’acceptation rationnelle des conclusions. L’importance et la légitimité de ces formes d’arguments, qui ont longtemps été considérées comme fallacieuses, ont été controversées parmi les logiciens de la tradition logique aristotélicienne. En revanche, la jurisprudence islamique (fiqh) a depuis longtemps reconnu l’importance des formes de raisonnement non déductives et a démontré que les sophismes conventionnellement compris ne sont pas essentiellement des sophismes. Le qiyās – qui représente généralement le raisonnement analogique – est un exemple de raisonnement réfutable dans l’argumentation islamique. Je montre à travers les travaux de deux juristes-logiciens musulmans médiévaux emblématiques, al-Juwainī et al-Ghazzālī, que la compréhension de la légitimité des formes d’arguments non déductives est au cœur des théories juridiques islamiques (usūl al-fiqh), qui ont proposé une méthode d’approche dialectique (jadal). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Courtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconograhy, and RitualRita M. GrossCourtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconograhy, and Ritual. By Serinity Young. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. 256 pp.This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Buddhism and gender. It presents information and explores issues on this topic in new and innovative ways. It is also well researched and well (...) written. Part of Young's innovation is her use of Buddhist art and iconography, which she takes as seriously as textual sources are usually taken in Buddhist studies. Many of her most interesting suggestions and conclusions result from the seriousness with which she takes Buddhist art as resource for understanding Buddhism more accurately and completely. The other foci are clear from her subtitle: narrative and ritual. There is much less attention to the canonical and philosophical texts of Buddhism that are so often invoked in studies of Buddhism and gender.Studies of sexuality or gender often end up primarily discussing new information about women and new ways of understanding women's participation in or exclusion from religion. This study is no exception, which is not in any way to fault the book. Young's analyses center on ways that women have been both included in the Buddhist world and excluded from that world. Among the many varieties of Buddhism, Young primarily focuses on early Indian Buddhism and Tantric Buddhism, which have the most provocative teachings about gender and sexuality. In Young's analyses, we see how women participated in early Buddhism in ways that have not been recognized in most earlier scholarship and ways in which they are excluded from Tantric Buddhism and most later forms of Buddhism that have not always been acknowledged.Young's interpretations of the traditional life stories of the Buddha are extremely innovative and interesting. She argues that the future Buddha's rejection of women when he left his home and family must be balanced with his reintegration into the world of women before and during his enlightenment experience. She argues that this reintegration is evidenced especially in his acceptance of food from Sujata and in the help he received from the Earth Goddess during his trials with Mara. Young argues that many Buddhists throughout the ages have focused on episodes in his life that deal with rejection of women but have not fully taken in the implications of the stories in which women become important allies in the mission of the Buddha.The sources for early Indian Buddhism most invoked by Western scholars of Buddhism are textual. These textual sources present a very mixed picture of women's lot in early Indian Buddhism. On the one hand, the Therigatha and some stories from the life of the Buddha present a relatively optimistic picture of women's possibilities and their acceptance in the early Buddhist community. On the other hand, texts present a constant message of the importance of renunciation, and much of the recommended renunciation involves women. Texts written by and for monks frequently conflate women with sexuality and hold women responsible for wayward monks' sexual temptations. Against this widely known material, Young calls upon the evidence of early Indian Buddhist art to argue that the monks' anti-women texts [End Page 174] do not tell the whole story about women in early Indian Buddhism. The art work, which was much more important for tutoring largely illiterate Buddhist laypeople, consistently portrays women voluptuously and positively. This contrast between text and art is so great that recently, during a slide show in a class I taught on ancient Indian Buddhism, a student asked point blank how monks could possibly sanction the voluptuous portrayals of women common in early Indian Buddhist sanctuaries. I didn't remember Young's cogent analysis at first, but eventually did reply, using her analysis. The monastic establishment controlled the discourse that eventually became the texts of early Buddhism, but the lay donors controlled the visual representations that decorated the sites where Buddhism was preserved. The lay donors were more than happy to represent the fecundity and beauty of women, without whom there would be no future donors or... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist NarrativeRandall Everett AllsupEric Prieto, Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative ( Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002)Modernism. The Interpretation of Dreams, the assembly line, The Rite of Spring, the Panama Canal. The modernist sensibility is characterized above all by the "willful big idea"—history as text, a manifesto in conflict with itself and its past. Hopeful and revolutionary like (...) the writings of Karl Marx or progressive and corrupt like the Manhattan Project, such events-as-manifesto had a way of feeding off each other. Through collaboration, conflict, and competition, modernists from Robert Moses to Elliott Carter raced to explain and exemplify, often deliberately creating conflict as if crisis were its own rationale, its own sine qua non. One could hypothesize that this arms race of complexity collapsed—exhausted—about the same time that Communism did. Its failure to sustain its ideas (rather than outpace them one after another) may be one reason we live in an anti-dialectical world, an unmodern place of fundamentalisms and easy freedoms.Author Eric Prieto is at home in the modern world more so than the present; his heroes are French intellectuals after all, those lovers of complexity. In Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative, he investigates late modernist authors who looked to music as a way to exemplify the inward nature of mind [End Page 93] and the outward nature of place. To understand this book, we must revisit some formal aesthetic theories, namely that music's value resides in its ability to name without signifying, that musical properties like intervallic distance, dynamic contrast, and the space-time component that is rhythm put us in touch with the Kantian a priori—the-thing-in-itself, the Schopenhauerian will. Music as sound-in-itself (to riff on Kant and Schopenhauer) becomes a metaphor for the noumenal world or is mimetic at the very least of the abstract and non-linear nature of thought. Prieto argues that "wherever a music model is present [among his examples] it always serves to further this inwardly directed mode of mimesis I call 'listening in,' where the primary object of representation is not the outside world but the subtly modulating interactions between consciousness and world."1Prieto's book is highly consistent. He masterfully captures the spirit of cooperation from modernist writer to musician to thinker and back. Concentrating on three authors, Robert Pinget, Michel Leiris, and Samuel Beckett, Prieto cites the influences of composers like Bach and Beethoven, as well as philosophers like Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer on their literary works. He brings in thinking from Nelson Goodman and Ferdinand de Saussure. The result is literary criticism as manifesto. Reader beware, this is a book for an elevated audience, those rare folk who are comfortable with structural linguistics, nineteenth-century music aesthetics, specialized academic scholarship, and word puzzles. To explain for example why an author like Beckett is inspired by music to create abstract or associative narratives rather than traditional stories of cause and effect, Prieto writes:In music, this progression necessarily takes place on the level of audible resemblances, but in literature, by virtue of the properties of the two-tiered linguistic sign, analogical progression may take place either on the level of the signifier (via the principle of paronomasia), on the level of the signified (via metaphorical substitutions, as in the association of ideas), or between the two levels (punning, "imitative harmony").2This density of language and concept speak well of Prieto's intellect and one is likewise impressed by his broad understanding of music and letters, yet it is the musical scholar who gets the short end of the deal. Paronomasia? "Audible resemblance" is not a musical term I have heard used. In Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative, music serves as starting point, an inspiration, not as an equal partner. This holds true for Beckett and Pinget as well as for Prieto. The result can be disconcerting, even to readers like me for whom the cross-disciplinary study of music and literature is a fascinating endeavor.Difficulty, nonetheless, has its rewards and this is one lesson of... (shrink)

In making analogical arguments about actions, is more similarity between the source and target cases always better? No: all things considered, more similarity is not always better, even if the similarities are all relevant. The reason is that the context of the argument, including emotional considerations, modulates the selection of the source case to service the goals of the argument. If the goals of the argument include persuasion and even modifying someone’s emotional state, increasing the overall similarity between the source (...) and target may be counterproductive. (shrink)

People's desire not to limit the meaning of Hancang driving force, continuous development and self-transcendence, which is people from within and beyond the root driving force. The so-called "inner beyond" is not a process of idealism, which began with the desire, from the bottom of the body, and go up on the layer by layer through the heart of the development process裡and mental flexibility, and would therefore have to enhance and transform. We regard the body as I desire the presence (...) of mode. Significance by the driving force in the body and thus close to the appearance, at first non-verbal, and then eventually completed in the language of representation. Through a variety of different non-linguistic representation, the meaning of the body of the driving force to obtain specific and differentiation, as music, art, dance, drama art form ... ... and so on. These different forms of art of common origins, is made ​​to understand the forms of physical exercise, as they are each other's differences, then is made ​​to understand the form of different, such as voice, image, attitude ... ... and so the nature and rules lawyers, and the rise because of their differences on the artistic and cultural expressions of different, and even the formation of the various arts precinct. In order to film art integrated voice, image and body movement, presented at the time of the current moving image, to the above description of the story. Different types of art is "the desire of the induced mover", which provides clear instructions and guidance In order to man the desire for meaning. The meaning of desire is the driving force of development of art in different fields to cross-border basic driving force. Story has entered into a description of the classification of the appearance of language, its basic features is metaphorical. Cross-disciplinary domain of the past will pin their hopes on the concepts and logical reasoning and arguments permit. Today, the language of metaphor for understanding the nature, making metaphor and narrative clues as cross-domain, and in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and even among. The reason why life events, actions and circumstances can be constructed to the story, because there I am with the interaction between multiple otherness, its impetus came from one continuous extrapolation, and extrapolation of each other. And diversity of his stories were always the people the story, and always coming to the multivariate description of those who hear him. Through stories, we witness In order to the meaning of life, but always to witness the way metaphor and description of each story to each other through mutual enrichment. Description of the future, after all, the story, no matter real or imagined, there is established based on the relationship regardless of which I was with him who have the freedom in the relationship, a relationship in freedom. It is also across the world who can not break the fundamental driving force and field-based. This paper assumes that there is an undetermined dynamic energy for meaningfulness in human desire, which develops and transcends any particular realization. This is the original energy by which human beings could attain transcendence by way of immanence, which is not an idealist process, but rather originated from a body-based desire that develops upwards and fuller to integrate the mental and the spiritual. Representability, first non-linguistic and then linguistic, is the access to meaning for our desire that takes body as its mode of existence. Through different forms of representation, such as sounds, pictures and gestures ... etc., the project of meaning is specified. The movement of body in intelligible forms is the common origin of music, dancing and performative arts. Cultural difference and artistic boundaries are based upon differences in the nature and rule of these intelligible forms. The art of filming, which synthesizes image, music and body movement in presenting images moving in time so as to tell stories of various kinds. All forms of art are "inducers of desire" by articulating, determining and guiding our desire for meaning. This dynamic development of our desire for meaning is the common basic energy by which we can cross the borders of different arts. Story-telling presupposes linguistic representation accessible to our meaning dynamism. In the past, concepts and logical reasoning and argumentation were taken to be the hope for interdisciplinary research. But now, with the better understanding we have of the metaphoric nature of language, metaphors and narratives are taken to be the clue for a cross-bordering effort in different sciences, human , social and natural. If there are events, actions and plots in human existence to be constructed as stories, it is because there is always interaction with multiple others, the dynamism of it consisting in our incessant act of strangification and mutual strangification. Stories are always stories about one self with multiple others and told to multiple others. By telling stories, we witness a particular way of meaningful life, always metaphorically interpreted. We achieve mutual enrichment by telling stories to each other. The ultimate foundation of cross-bordering in arts and scientific disciplines consists in the ontology of dynamic relation, in which there is relatedness in freedom and freedom in being related, and this is the ground on which all our life stories, both real and imaginative, are based. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Kant’s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth CenturyRobert HannaTom Rockmore. In Kant’s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Pp. 213. Paper, $24.95.In In Kant's Wake, Tom Rockmore sets himself the almost impossibly ambitious task of telling a coherent story about the sprawling set of thinkers, doctrines, arguments, journal articles, books, social institutions, teachings, and other intellectual practices that make up philosophy in the twentieth century. (...) His highly plausible unifying hypothesis is that twentieth-century philosophy is a series of creative and reactive footnotes to Kant's Critical Philosophy as encapsulated in the Critique of Pure Reason, and in particular, to Kant's transcendental idealism. Of course the same unifying hypothesis is equally plausible of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the history of philosophy since Kant is just the history of post-Kantian philosophy.Rather than telling a single long story, Rockmore tells five shorter stories. He begins his narrative with a chapter on Kant's metaphysics and immediate responses to the Critique of Pure Reason (ch. 2). Then he focuses, in turn, on the diachronic developments of Marxism (ch. 3), pragmatism, (ch. 4), phenomenology (ch. 5), and analytic philosophy (ch. 6). The five stories are framed by a methodological chapter on the problem of interpreting twentieth-century philosophy (ch. 1), and a concluding chapter on the relation between Kant and the overall shape of philosophy in the twentieth century (ch. 7).Three more or less explicitly-stated interpretive principles run through each of Rockmore's historical narratives. The first, as I have already mentioned, is the grand unifying hypothesis of the essentially protean character of Kant's first Critique and the metaphysics of transcendental idealism. The second is that each distinct philosophical movement is [End Page 676] fundamentally organized around the teachings and writings of a few "master" or "strong" thinkers (14). And the third is that the history of philosophy is nothing but a multi-voiced Socratic conversation (13). Everyone knows how even the most intensely animated intellectual conversation can end with an inconclusive whimper instead of a conclusive bang. According to Rockmore, that is basically what happened to the great philosophical conversation of the twentieth century.In the chapter on Kant, Rockmore usefully distinguishes between two strands of transcendental idealism that Kant regarded as fully complementary, but which tended to run and pull in sharply opposite directions in post-Kantian philosophy: (1) the representationalist strand, and (2) the constructivist strand (36). Now Kant's transcendental idealism says four things. First, cognition is the mental representation of objects. Second, the objects we cognize are nothing but appearances or phenomena and never things-in-themselves or noumena. Third, the generic structure of the objects and the world we cognize is identical to the non-empirical or a priori generic structure of the innate cognitive capacities or faculties of our minds. And fourth, the human mind is spontaneously active in producing the specific structures of the very objects we cognize when our faculties are triggered by particular sensory inputs. The first and second theses of transcendental idealism constitute its representationalist strand, and the third and fourth theses constitute its constructivist strand.The decomposition of the orginal Kantian vector into its representationalist and constructivist components helps Rockmore in his interpretation of the four main sub-movements of twentieth-century philosophy. Marxism or dialectical materialism, organized of course around the teachings and writings of Karl Marx, is an economic, social, and political version of post-Kantian constructivism focused on the concrete struggles of alienated individuals and groups to achieve liberation and self-realization in collective action. So too pragmatism, organized around the teachings and writings of C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, is another version of post-Kantian constructivism, this time focused on the idea that the meaning and truth of concepts and propositions is strictly determined by the practical pay-offs of applying those concepts and propositions.By contrast, phenomenology and analytic philosophy are both versions of representationalism. Phenomenology is organized around the teaching and writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and focuses on the structures of consciousness and object-directedness... (shrink)

No one disputes that certain cognitive tasks involve the use of images. On the other hand, there has been substantial disagreement over whether the representations in which imaginal tasks are carried out are imaginal or propositional. The empirical literature on the topic which has accrued over the last twenty years suggests that there is a functional equivalence between mental imagery and perception: when peopIe imagine a scene or event, the mental processes that occur are functionally similar in important senses to (...) what happens when they visually perceive an analogous scene or event. What is in dispute is not this principle of equivalence, but rather what conclusions should be drawn from it about the representational medium used in imagery.The problem to be explained is what internal cognitive events transpire when people answer questions like “What color is a bee’s head?” Most people report that they imagine a picture of the insect and then look at the head in the image to determine its color. Although there is no more reason to accept these introspective reports as a good account of cognitive processes than in any other cognitive phenomena, there are many empirical results which lend credence to the idea that there are mental images of some kind.Some theorists have taken the empirical results as evidence that there exists a special, non-symbolic representational medium for imagery. Others have insisted that the imagery data can be explained best in terms of the more general, symbolic representations which are usually taken to underly higher level cognitive tasks. In this paper I shall evaluate the arguments for both imaginal and propositional representations in the hope of assessing the status of the imagery debate. I shall conclude that imaginal theories represent the most reasonable account of imagery. (shrink)

This thesis addresses two enduring issues in legal theory-- rationality and its association with rule of law values--by offering detailed models of two patterns of legal reasoning. One is reasoning by analogy. The other is the inference process that legal reasoners use when they defer epistemically to scientific experts in the course of reaching legal decisions. Discussions in both chapters reveal that the inference pattern known as "abduction" is a deeply important element of many legal inferences, including analogy and epistemic (...) deference to experts--something that has been largely unrecognized in legal theory. After presenting a detailed model of analogy, Chapter 1 argues that legal reasoning by analogy, like analogical argument in logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences, possesses a great deal of rational force when properly executed. Chapter 2 investigates the reasoning process by which non-expert legal reasoners defer epistemically to the judgments of scientists. It presents five main conclusions or explanations. Every practical syllogism actually consists of two distinct chains of inference, and what is usually considered in writings on practical reasoning to be the minor premise of a practical syllogism is actually the conclusion of a separate chain of argument. When a practical reasoner defers epistemically to a theoretical expert, this separate chain of argument has a special structure, which is modeled in Chapter 2. The non-expert legal reasoner must always make a prescriptive practical judgment about the standard of epistemic appraisal and level of epistemic confidence that the reasoner requires of scientific evidence before it may be relied upon in reaching a legal decision. Legal systems should be committed to an emergent rule of law ideal identified and referred to as "intellectual due process" which condemns epistemically arbitrary reasoning processes insofar as they play a role in legal decisionmaking. Since non-arbitrariness is a necessary condition of both epistemic and legal legitimacy, we have compelling reason to doubt that the non-arbitrariness condition can be met when non-experts defer epistemically to scientific experts. (shrink)

We argue that legal argumentation, as the subject matter as well as a special subfield of Argumentation Studies (AS), has to be examined by making skilled use of the full panoply of tools such as argumentation and story schemes which are at the forefront of current work in AS. In reviewing the literature, we make explicit our own methodological choices (particularly regarding the place of normative deliberation in practical reasoning) and then illustrate the implications of such an approach through the (...) analysis of a case study in the English law of evidence. We argue that a clear distinction must be drawn between practical argumentation and stories. Because of the institutional separation between legal judgment and fact-finding in common-law jury trials, we argue for the combination of argument and story-based analysis. (shrink)

Both the itihāsa-s of the Mahābhārata and the Platonic philosophical ‘epode’ are often used to persuade in conditions where emotion threatens to incapacitate the person for argumentative discourse. Narrative reason has its own conditions of success and failure, opening up a discursive arena in which all kinds of utterances are welcome. Emphasizing the psychagogic function of the ‘once-upon-a-time’ reason, it is worth asking who the real protagonist of the story is and whether the story has a duty or a dharma (...) of its own to fulfill. Dharma and all the dilemmas it brings along with it constitute one of the fundamental problems that make up the whole Mahābhārata. In this essay I wonder about the dharma of the Mahābhārata itself—a literary work which gives itself the name ‘triumph’ (jaya)—and the cultural mission it fulfills in the lives of those who hear it, read it, study it, and share it with others. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Voice of Thersites:Reflections on the Origins of the Idea of EqualitySiep StuurmanIn the first century bc the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus observed that there were kings before the discovery of writing.1 Diodorus was right: the shared reflection about the human condition made possible by writing emerged in societies where distinctions between ruler and ruled, man and woman, master and slave, lord and commoner, and finally native and foreigner (...) constituted the "deep normality" of social life. No wonder that so much of early social and political thought consists of justifications of inequality. Powerful discourses of inequality told everyone what their station in life was and instructed them to speak and behave accordingly.What is truly remarkable, viewed against this background, is the emergence of ideas of equality. Why and how did people arrive at the daring and implausible idea that men are equal? In the history of political thought this question is usually discussed in the context of the advent of democratic rule in the Greek polis, that is, in a situation in which the demos is already constituted as a political actor. To constitute itself politically, however, the people or its spokesmen must already command a language in which the claim of equality can be expressed. In this essay I seek to retrieve the origins of that language, the historical moment when equality became thinkable in a setting in which the politicized demos had not yet appeared on the horizon. I will examine the famous Thersites episode in Homer's Iliad to show how this could happen, but my argument goes beyond the case of Homer. In the conclusion of this essay I will outline a general framework for the analysis of the interplay between social experiences, available languages, and the origins of ideas of equality. [End Page 171]Equality was not an empirical idea.2 Quite the contrary, the numbing repetition of the daily routines of inequality would seem to make it almost unthinkable, in the same category as black suns and men walking upside down. In such circumstances where was there space for the very thought of equality? How could it even find a voice amidst the deafening roar of kings, priests, and aristocrats? That simple question is my starting point.I will approach this question by means of an equally simple conjecture. Ideas of equality emerge when men or women draw on the egalitarian potentialities of available shared languages, and they do so to make sense of and to change or sustain determinate social experiences. Notions of equality do not arise out of the blue. They usually take the form of a critique of prevailing ideas about the superiority of some people above others. In that sense every discourse of equality is grafted upon some previously articulated discourse of inequality. All discourses of equality are potentially egalitarian because "equality, as an idea, consists in the belief that things can be alike and when alike should receive similar treatment."3 When somebody asserts that "we" are in some relevant sense "like them," the very utterance of the claim implies a questioning of the given relationship between "us" and "them."Where to begin our investigation? I start from the assumption that civilizations are, among other things, defined by the texts on which they confer canonical status. That is not to say that such texts are unquestionable or that their message is unequivocal. Canonical texts are not simply commands or prescriptions, they rather provide the master narratives and exemplary stories later authors draw upon to formulate authoritative interpretations. The major canonical texts of civilizations can usefully be seen as the stepping stones leading to the main interpretative traditions. The Homeric epics, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur'an, and the Analects of Confucius are outstanding examples of such canonical texts. The first step in our investigation is therefore an examination of such texts, looking for critiques of inequality as well as implicit or explicit notions of equality.Homeric Equality?On the face of it Homer may seem an unlikely source for the emergence of any notion of equality. In his influential history of ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre asserts that the Homeric concepts of goodness... (shrink)

John Woods and Brent Hudak’s theory on arguments by analogy (1989), although correct in its meta-argumentative approach, gives rise to problems when we consider the possibility of weighing reasons. I contend that this is an outcome of construing the relationship between the premises and the conclusion of arguments compared in argumentation by analogy as inferences. An interpretation in terms of reasons is proposed here. The reasons-based approach solves these problems and allows the theory to be extended to account for a (...) particular variant of argumentation by analogy in which the subjects of comparison are not arguments, but weighings of reasons. (shrink)

I argue that death can be (and sometimes is) bad for cattle because it destroys relationships that are valuable for cattle for their own sake. The argument relies on an analogy between valuable human relationships and relationships cattle form with conspecifics. I suggest that the reasons we have for thinking that certain rich and meaningful human relationships are valuable for their own sake should also lead us to think that certain cattle relationships are valuable for their own sake. And just (...) as death is bad for us when it destroys our valuable relationships, so death is bad for cattle when it destroys their valuable relationships. This argument is important because it pinpoints something that is bad about death for cattle that is overlooked by popular accounts of the badness of death for non-human animals that focus exclusively on the impact of death on lifetime well-being levels. Thus, the argument reveals an overlooked moral cost of some of our farming practices. (shrink)

This dissertation centers on a prominent but generally neglected line of argument in Kant's second analogy of experience. It differs from most other recent treatments of this section of the Critique of Pure Reason in taking Kant to be concerned there with conditions of representation or putative awareness rather than mere conditions of verification or confirmation. This difference in conception has profound implications for the interpretation not only of the section itself but also of the transcendental deduction of the categories (...) and other crucial parts of Kant's theoretical philosophy. The dissertation does not maintain that recognition of the line of argument in question allows for the solution of all problems in regard to the second analogy. This line of argument---like those ascribed to Kant on all other interpretations with which the author is familiar---may not lead to the conclusion that there cannot be an event which does not have a cause. It does, however, still appear to be sound in important respects. This, the author tries to show, has intriguing implications and allows us to see Kant as having his finger on something of true originality and philosophical importance in the second analogy. It also suggests an unexpected, subtle, and richly nuanced relation between Kant and his great awakener Hume. This relation is traced in detail in the final chapter of the dissertation. Other chapters include detailed analysis not only of the text of the second analogy itself but also of numerous commentators upon it. (shrink)

David Furley's work on the cosmologies of classical antiquity is structured around what he calls "two pictures of the world." The first picture, defended by both Plato and Aristotle, portrays the universe, or all that there is (to pan), as identical with our particular ordered world-system. Thus, the adherents of this view claim that the universe is finite and unique. The second system, defended by Leucippus and Democritus, portrays an infinite universe within which our particular kosmos is only one of (...) countless kosmoi. Aristotle's argument in De caelo I.9 that the world is necessarily unique is an important contribution to this debate. This argument holds interest because it shows Aristotle wrestling with an apparent inconsistency in his own philosophy, as deeply-held convictions within his cosmology collide with an equally deeply-held conviction within his metaphysics. The following three principles, each of which Aristotle appears committed to, are inconsistent: -/- The cosmic uniqueness principle. The world is necessarily unique. The cosmic form principle. The world is an ordered, structured unity. As such, the world has a form. The possibility of multiple instantiation principle. For all F, if F is a form, it is possible that there exist multiple Fs. In De caelo I.9, Aristotle argues that we can establish the uniqueness of the universe, reject the multiple instantiation principle, yet still retain the distinction between 'this world' and 'world in general,' if the following is true (as it is): the world takes up all the matter that exists. Aristotle illustrates this argument with one of the stranger analogies in his corpus: imagine an aquiline nose that takes up all the flesh in the universe. If this were so, then there could not exist any other aquiline objects whatsoever. (For this reason, we dub the De caelo I.9 argument the 'Cosmic Nose argument.') This paper is an interpretation of how this argument is supposed to proceed and an assessment of its success. The first section states the problem Aristotle is confronted with, sorts through Aristotle's various statements of the Cosmic Nose argument, which exhibit some sloppiness, and reconstructs charitably a single argument. We also spend some time examining the significance of Aristotle's example of a gigantic aquiline nose. We argue that, even charitably reconstructed, the argument appears to commit a serious modal fallacy. The remainder of the paper explores whether this modal fallacy can be overcome. We conclude that, although not a cogent argument for the uniqueness of the world (as this would require a significant revision of our current astronomy), the Cosmic Nose argument does succeed on its own terms. However, it should not be regarded as a free-standing argument for the uniqueness of the world. Instead, it depends crucially on the earlier argument in De caelo I.8 for the universe's uniqueness; De caelo I.9 should be viewed as an attempt to extend the conclusion of De caelo I.8 and to show how this conclusion can be made consistent with Aristotle's metaphysical principles about the nature of form. (shrink)

Thought Experiments in Ethics, 2021 CONTENTS Preface i Chapter I The Story in Your Head: Tomoceuszkakatiti and Gyugyu 1 Chapter II How Thought Experiments Move Us: The Samaritan and His Neighbours 16 Chapter III What Makes a Thought Experiment? 34 Chapter IV Thought Experiments in Practical Philosophy and Bioethics 75 Chapter V The Experience Machine 93 Chapter VI The Last Man Argument 129 Chapter VII The Trolley Problem 158 Chapter VIII The Violinist Analogy 213 Conclusion 246 Notes 248.

Human beings seem to capture time and the temporal properties of events and things in thought by having beliefs usually expressed with statements using tense, or notions such as ‘now’, ‘past’ or ‘future’. Tensed beliefs like these seem indispensable for correct reasoning and timely action. For instance, my belief that my root canal is over seems inexpressible with a statement that does not use tense or a temporal indexical. However, the dominant view on the nature of time is that it (...) forms, with space, a four-dimensional continuum where time does not encompass private perspectives or an absolute, fixed present. This ‘tenseless’ theory of time encounters a challenge in integrating tensed belief, because it cannot easily explain what constitutes a tensed belief in a tenseless world and how such a belief works inside our cognitive network to bring about the actions it does. Providing such an account is the main goal of this dissertation. -/- I argue here that the correct way to proceed would be to utilize philosophical theories dealing with indexicality, as the puzzling features of tensed belief are shared with beliefs expressed by first-person or spatial indexicals. In chapters II and III I expand the dominant theories about indexicality (Lewis, Perry, Kaplan) and apply them to tensed belief. I show that each is in certain respects incomplete or inadequate. -/- My preferred account critiques the preceding theories as mis-attributing the indexicality involved to a fully conceptual element in the way people think about time. I argue that we should instead connect tensed belief to not fully conceptual elements thought. For support I turn to work in perceptual psychology that connects beliefs about space to perceptions of spatial features. In chapter IV I develop an analogous argument about temporal thought and discuss how mental representations involved in perceptions are constitutively related to the formation and preservation of tensed beliefs. Combining this story with a tenseless theory of time should give us a complete, metaphysically uncontroversial, account of the way a tensed belief functions in reasoning and produces timely action. (shrink)

Our experience of narrative has an internal and an external aspect--the content of the narrative’s representations, and its intentional, communicative aetiology. The interaction of these two things is crucial to understanding how narrative works. I begin by laying out what I think we can reasonably expect from a narrative by way of causal information, and how causality interacts with other attributes we think of as central to narrative. At a certain point this discussion will strike a problem: our judgements about (...) what is a relevant possibility within the narrative’s story depend on our judgements of probability; but these latter judgements depend, in turn, on factors external to the world of the story, and cannot be explained in terms of causal relations available within the story. We need the external, author-centred perspective at this point. These different perspectives, the internal and the external, correspond to different types of explanations we may give of events in a story; I call these internal and external explanations. I show how these different explanations are made use of in two contrasting arthistorical projects. I use these examples as the basis for a generalisation about the structure of the two explanatory forms. Finally, I suggest some ways in which explanations of these two kinds relate to one another, and to our thinking when we are engaged by a narrative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Islamic Disputation Theory: The Uses & Rules of Argument in Medieval Islam by Larry Benjamin MillerKhaled El-RouayhebLarry Benjamin Miller. Islamic Disputation Theory: The Uses & Rules of Argument in Medieval Islam. Logic, Argumentation and Reasoning 21. Cham: Springer 2020. Pp. xviii + 143. Hardback, €77.99.Very few unpublished PhD dissertations have had a formative influence on a field. One of the precious few is Larry Miller's Princeton dissertation from (...) 1984 on Islamic disputation theory. It proposed an original and compelling account of the development of the discipline, from the earliest extant Arabic works in the tenth century to the composition of classic madrasa handbooks in the late thirteenth century. It has been cited regularly in the past decades and has served as the starting point for all later studies of Arabic/Islamic dialectics in European languages. The fact that it has finally been published is a fitting tribute to a study that is even more admirable for having been written when many of the primary sources were still only available as manuscripts.Part of the explanation for why the dissertation was not published sooner may be that its author did not pursue an academic career. And as he states in a short preface, he has not kept abreast of all relevant studies and editions that have appeared since his dissertation. A thorough revision and update has therefore not been possible. Though some minor corrections and revisions have been made, the book is still by and large the influential 1984 dissertation, now made available with a short introduction by Walter Young, one of the leading younger scholars in the field, along with helpful indices of proper names and subjects.Miller's narrative begins with Arabic works on disputation (jadal) by a number of theologians from the late ninth and tenth centuries, such as Ibn al-Rāwandī (d. 911), [End Page 518] al-Ash'arī (d. 935), and the Karaite Jewish scholar al-Qirqisānī (d. ca. 960). The basic assumption was that a questioner (sā'il) would ask a claimant (mu'allil) (i) what his view is; (ii) what the ground or reason ('illa) for that view is; (iii) the appropriateness of the ground/reason for the view; and (iv) to verify the ground/reason by showing it to be commensurate with the view. The ground/reason for the theological dialecticians was standardly an entity or property, not a premise. The reasoning tended to be informal and analogical, as opposed to explicitly making syllogistic deductions from quantified premises.Parallel to this theological tradition of jadal, there was an Arabic Aristotelian tradition that took its point of departure from Aristotle's Topics, translated into Arabic more than once in the period from the late eighth to the early tenth centuries. Though also often referred to as jadal, this tradition, represented by the writings of al-Farabi (d. 950), Avicenna (d. 1037), and Averroes (d. 1198), retained distinct features. It tended to deny any epistemic value to dialectics, instead seeing it as useful only insofar as it provided logical training. For the Aristotelian/Neoplatonic philosophers, the pursuit of truth was the preserve of demonstrative syllogism (burhān). Whereas the theological dialecticians envisaged a claimant (mu'allil) and a questioner (sā'il), with the burden of proof on the former, the philosophical tradition had a questioner (sā'il) seek, in the manner of Socratic elenchus, to elicit from a respondent (mujῑb) a series of answers that would allow the construction of a syllogism whose conclusion contradicted the respondent's initial position.From the time of al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Islamic theologians tended to take over the syllogistic ideal of reasoning from the philosophers, perhaps explaining why theological writings on jadal trail off after the eleventh century. The informal, analogical jadal tradition continued, however, in the writings of Islamic jurists. From the eleventh century, scholars such as Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī (d. 1083) and al-Juwaynī (d. 1085) wrote works on jadal in which the examples are disputes about questions of Islamic law and the disputants are partisans of the various legal schools. This tradition of what Miller calls "juristic dialectics" (74, 95) later adopted some... (shrink)

This dissertation is an attempt to examine the role of historical argument in political theory. Its main contention is that political theory, rather than relying on concepts of abstract right and timeless duty, often attempts to convince by giving its readers a particular sense of history. I argue that authors of political theory in many instances present to their readers a narrative, rather than a logic, of politics. Political theory persuades not simply by reason but by giving the reader a (...) more convincing account of history and of the particular role s/he is to play. Consequently, I maintain, we put our own powers of interpretation in a strait-jacket if we approach each book of political theory only in search of an everlasting argument. Our readings will be more fruitful if we consider the qualities of historical argument alongside those of abstract right. The project of political theory, I conclude, is not so much to reform our morals as it is to reform our memories. ;The weight of my argument falls on extended interpretations of three figures in the history of political thought: G. W. F. Hegel, John Locke, and Friedrich Nietzsche. My aim in each chapter is to show that these theorists are at their most persuasive when the historical element in their thought is brought to the forefront. Taken together, however, they do not provide a single 'historical' viewpoint; instead they offer markedly different narratives which rest on different notions of human experience: Locke's account stresses labor, both mental and physical. Hegel's story is rooted in his understanding of art and beauty. Nietzsche's history centers on matters of violence and pain. ;In the prologue and conclusion I consider how political debates can often appear as historical disputes . By reading political theory with an eye to history, I hope to restore it to a position from which it can contribute to such controversies and speak directly to some of our political concerns, even if it must remain, to some degree, persistently aloof from them. (shrink)

This book brings together in one place David Hitchcock’s most significant published articles on reasoning and argument. In seven new chapters he updates his thinking in the light of subsequent scholarship. Collectively, the papers articulate a distinctive position in the philosophy of argumentation. Among other things, the author:• develops an account of “material consequence” that permits evaluation of inferences without problematic postulation of unstated premises.• updates his recursive definition of argument that accommodates chaining and embedding of arguments and allows any (...) type of illocutionary act to be a conclusion. • advances a general theory of relevance.• provides comprehensive frameworks for evaluating inferences in reasoning by analogy, means-end reasoning, and appeals to considerations or criteria.• argues that none of the forms of arguing ad hominem is a fallacy.• describes proven methods of teaching critical thinking effectively. (shrink)

This paper applies recent work on scripts and stories developed as tools of evidential reasoning in artificial intelligence to model the use of argument from analogy as a rhetorical device of persuasion. The example studied is Gerry Spence’s closing argument in the case of Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee Corporation, said to be the most persuasive closing argument ever used in an American trial. It is shown using this example how argument from analogy is based on a similarity premise where similarity between (...) two cases is modeled using the device of a story scheme from the hybrid theory of legal evidential reasoning (Bex in Arguments, stories and criminal evidence: a formal hybrid theory. Springer, Dordrecht 2011). It is shown how the rhetorical strategy of Spence’s argumentation in the closing argument interweaves argument from analogy with explanation through three levels. (shrink)

In this paper, it is shown (1) that there are two schemes for argument from analogy that seem to be competitors but are not, (2) how one of them is based on a distinctive type of similarity premise, (3) how to analyze the notion of similarity using story schemes illustrated by some cases, (4) how arguments from precedent are based on arguments from analogy, and in many instances arguments from classification, and (5) that when similarity is defined by means of (...) episode schemes, we can get a clearer idea of how it integrates with the use of argument from classification and argument from precedent in case-based reasoning by using a dialogue structure. (shrink)

There is disagreement over the notion of representation in cognitive science. Many investigators equate representations with symbols, that is, with syntactically defined elements in an internal symbol system. In recent years there have been two challenges to this orthodoxy. First, a number of philosophers, including many outside the symbolist orthodoxy, have argued that "representation" should be understood in its classical sense, as denoting a "stands for" relation between representation and represented. Second, there has been a growing challenge to orthodoxy under (...) the banner of connectionism. Although this connectionist challenge has evoked emotionally-charged rebukes from the symbolist camp, connectionists as a group have not articulated a conception of representation to replace the symbolist view. Nonetheless, most agree on the need for a nonsymbolic notion of representation. This paper advances a "stands for" sense of representation as primary by incorporating it into a general approach to cognitive science consonant with the connectionism. The idea is to marry connectionism to a particular version of functionalism, viz., one that builds its notion of "function" on the similarity between functional analysis in biology and in psychology. It builds on my earlier work adapting and revising Marr's tri-level approach to cognition. My proposal frees Marr's analysis from its moorings in the orthodox symbolic view of representation and allies it with a notion of functional analysis akin to that proposed by Cummins, developed further by Haugeland, and invoked by Millikan and Dretske. Unlike these authors, however, I do not wed representation to a general belief-desire analysis of behavior. Rather, I follow what I take to be the lesson of psychological practice, according to which the investigator does not seek to explain behavior in general but seeks to analyze the cognitive capacities that underlie behavior, such as vision, memory, learning, and linguistic capacities. Accordingly, ascriptions of representational content are made not by working back from belief-desire ascriptions, but in the context of forming psychological models to account for specific cognitive capacities. Because conceptions of representation in cognitive science typically are embedded in a general approach to the study of cognition, arguments for the comparative plausibility of a particular conception of representation must scout these larger frameworks. I therefore begin by characterizing the interlocking set of assumptions that gave life to the orthodox symbolist approach, paying special attention to the complementarity between representation and process that naturally arises from those assumptions. I then consider two versions of an alternative approach to representation: Dretske's and my own. Finally, I urge the merits of the "cognitive capacities" over the "belief-desire" approach to the subject-matter of cognitive science. (shrink)

I. The argument from design or ‘teleological argument’ purports to be an inductive proof for the existence of God, proceeding from the evidence of the order exhibited by natural phenomena to the probable conclusion of a rational agent responsible for producing that order. The argument was severely criticized by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , and it was widely conceded that Hume's objections had cast serious doubt on the adequacy of the teleological argument, if not destroyed its (...) credibility entirely. However, there has been a recent reappraisal of this claim by R. G. Swinburne, who maintains that none of Hume's criticisms have any validity against a ‘carefully articulated version of the argument’. Using an analogical argument based on temporal regularities rather than on spatial regularities , Swinburne claims to have shown that the teleological argument is a legitimate inference to the best explanation whose force depends only on the strength of the analogy and on the degree to which the resulting theory makes explanation of empirical matters simpler and more coherent. Moreover, he claims to have shown that the argument provides support for the Christian monotheistic hypothesis and not merely for the weak claim that the universe was designed . This is an important claim since it has long been thought that Hume's most devastating blow was dealt when he showed that the teleological argument provides just as much support for the negation of certain propositions considered essential to Christian monotheism as it does for their affirmation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In this essay I characterize arguments by analogy, which have an impor- tant role both in philosophical and everyday reasoning. Arguments by analogy are dif- ferent from ordinary inductive or deductive arguments and have their own distinct features. I try to characterize the structure and function of these arguments. It is further discussed that some arguments, which are not explicit arguments by analogy, nevertheless should be interpreted as such and not as inductive or deductive arguments. The result is that (...) a presumed outcome of a philosophical dispute will have to be reconsidered. (shrink)

A peculiar feature of our species is that we settle what to believe, value, and do by reasoning through narratives. A narrative is adiachronic, information-rich story that contains persons, objects, and at least one event. When we reason through narrative, we usenarrative to settle what to do, to make predictions, to guide normative expectations, and to ground which reactive attitudes we think areappropriate in a situation. Narratives explain, justify, and provide understanding. Narratives play a ubiquitous role in human reasoning. Andyet, (...) narratives do not seem up to the task. Narratives are often unmoored representations (either because they are do not purport to referto the actual world, or because they are grossly oversimplified, or because are known to be literally false). Against this, I argue thatnarratives guide our reasoning by shaping our grasp of modal structure: what is possible, probable, plausible, permissible, required,relevant, desirable and good. Narratives are good guides to reasoning when they guide us to accurate judgments about modal space. Icall this the modal model of narrative. In this paper, I develop an account of how narratives function in reasoning, as well as an account ofwhen reasoning through narrative counts as good reasoning. (shrink)

Concepts are mental representations that are the constituents of thought. EdouardMachery claims that psychologists generally understand concepts to be bodies of knowledge or information carrying mental states stored in long term memory that are used in the higher cognitive competences such as in categorization judgments, induction, planning, and analogical reasoning. While most research in the concepts field generally have been on concrete concepts such as LION, APPLE, and CHAIR, this paper will examine abstract moral concepts and whether such concepts may (...) have prototype and exemplar structure. After discussing the philosophical importance of this project and explaining the prototype and exemplar theories, criticisms will be made against philosophers, who without experimental support from the sciences of the mind, contend that moral concepts have prototype and/or exemplar structure. Next, I will scrutinize Mark Johnson’s experimentally-based argument that moral concepts have prototype structure. Finally, I will show how our moral concepts may indeed have prototype and exemplar structure as well as explore the further ethical implications that may be reached by this particular moral concepts conclusion. (shrink)

In many domains of public discourse such as arguments about public policy, there is an abundance of knowledge to store, query, and reason with. To use this knowledge, we must address two key general problems: first, the problem of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck between forms in which the knowledge is usually expressed, e.g., natural language, and forms which can be automatically processed; second, reasoning with the uncertainties and inconsistencies of the knowledge. Given such complexities, it is labour and knowledge intensive (...) to conduct policy consultations, where participants contribute statements to the policy discourse. Yet, from such a consultation, we want to derive policy positions, where each position is a set of consistent statements, but where positions may be mutually inconsistent. To address these problems and support policy-making consultations, we consider recent automated techniques in natural language processing, instantiating arguments, and reasoning with the arguments in argumentation frameworks. We discuss application and “bridge” issues between these techniques, outlining a pipeline of technologies whereby: expressions in a controlled natural language are parsed and translated into a logic (a literals and rules knowledge base), from which we generate instantiated arguments and their relationships using a logic-based formalism (an argument knowledge base), which is then input to an implemented argumentation framework that calculates extensions of arguments (an argument extensions knowledge base), and finally, we extract consistent sets of expressions (policy positions). The paper reports progress towards reasoning with web-based, distributed, collaborative, incomplete, and inconsistent knowledge bases expressed in natural language. (shrink)

This paper describes a cubic water tank equipped with a movable partition receiving various amounts of liquid used to represent joint probability distributions. This device is applied to the investigation of deductive inferences under uncertainty. The analogy is exploited to determine by qualitative reasoning the limits in probability of the conclusion of twenty basic deductive arguments (such as Modus Ponens, And-introduction, Contraposition, etc.) often used as benchmark problems by the various theoretical approaches to reasoning under uncertainty. The probability bounds imposed (...) by the premises on the conclusion are derived on the basis of a few trivial principles such as "a part of the tank cannot contain more liquid than its capacity allows", or "if a part is empty, the other part contains all the liquid". This stems from the equivalence between the physical constraints imposed by the capacity of the tank and its subdivisions on the volumes of liquid, and the axioms and rules of probability. The device materializes de Finetti's coherence approach to probability. It also suggests a physical counterpart of Dutch book arguments to assess individuals' rationality in probability judgments in the sense that individuals whose degrees of belief in a conclusion are out of the bounds of coherence intervals would commit themselves to executing physically impossible tasks. (shrink)

In many domains of public discourse such as arguments about public policy, there is an abundance of knowledge to store, query, and reason with. To use this knowledge, we must address two key general problems: first, the problem of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck between forms in which the knowledge is usually expressed, e.g., natural language, and forms which can be automatically processed; second, reasoning with the uncertainties and inconsistencies of the knowledge. Given such complexities, it is labour and knowledge intensive (...) to conduct policy consultations, where participants contribute statements to the policy discourse. Yet, from such a consultation, we want to derive policy positions, where each position is a set of consistent statements, but where positions may be mutually inconsistent. To address these problems and support policy-making consultations, we consider recent automated techniques in natural language processing, instantiating arguments, and reasoning with the arguments in argumentation frameworks. We discuss application and “bridge” issues between these techniques, outlining a pipeline of technologies whereby: expressions in a controlled natural language are parsed and translated into a logic (a literals and rules knowledge base), from which we generate instantiated arguments and their relationships using a logic-based formalism (an argument knowledge base), which is then input to an implemented argumentation framework that calculates extensions of arguments (an argument extensions knowledge base), and finally, we extract consistent sets of expressions (policy positions). The paper reports progress towards reasoning with web-based, distributed, collaborative, incomplete, and inconsistent knowledge bases expressed in natural language. (shrink)