Descartes and Dialectics

Pragma-dialectics and Beyond

Pragma-dialectics is dynamic, context-sensitive, and multi-agent; it promises theories of fallacy and argumentative structure. But pragma-dialectic theory and practice are not yet fully in harmony. Key definitions of the theory fall short of explicating the analyses that pragma-dialecticians actually do. Many discussions involve more than two participants with different and mutually incompatibl...

The Descartes Rule of Sweeps and the Descartes Signature

The Descartes Rule of Signs, which establishes a bound on the number of positive roots of a polynomial with real coefficients, is extended to polynomials with complex coefficients. The extension is modified to bound the number of complex roots in a given direction on the complex plane, giving rise to the Descartes Signature of a polynomial. The search for the roots of a polynomial is sometimes ...

Geographic dialectics ?

As radical geography, inflected by Marx, has transformed into critical geography, influenced by poststructuralism and feminism, dialectical reasoning has come under attack from some poststructural geographers. Their construction of dialectics as inconsistent with poststructural thinking, difference, and assemblages is based, however, on a Hegelian conception of the dialectic. This Hegelian imag...

Dialectics, Evaluation, and Argument

Dialectics and Mathematics