Truth and Argument Evaluation

Dialectics, Evaluation, and Argument

Part Two: Logical Consequence ≠ Necessary Truth Preservation 1.1 Meta-theoretic Argument #1: the Gödel/tarski Argument

I suspect that this paper is written in a way that doesn’t reflect how Field actually came to the views he has about the normativity of logic. It seems likely to me that first (i) Field convinced himself that the relation of logical consequence could not be (even co-extensional with) the relation of necessary truth preservation (NTP), for reasons he lays out in PART TWO of the paper, then (ii) ...

Voting with Social Networks: Truth Springs from Argument Amongst Friends

In certain voting problems, a central authority must infer a hidden ground truth by aggregating the opinions of an electorate. When individual assessments are drawn i.i.d. and are correct with probability p > 0.5, aggregating enough votes will yield the ground truth with high probability. However, in reality voters’ opinions are often influenced by those of their friends. In certain social netw...

An Argument for a Phenomenological Pragmatic Conception of Truth

Correspondence theories of truth claim that truth involves a relationship between ideas in the mind and facts in the world, but because minds are viewed as being disconnected from the world, there is no way to determine whether beliefs are true or false under the correspondence view. For truth to be a meaningful concept, a theory about it must conceive of it in a way that is meaningful for huma...

Belief Updating and Argument Evaluation

Studies of how evidence affects beliefs sometimes show belief polarization in response to mixed evidence. However, the nature of the mental processes leading to change in opinion is up for debate. Different accounts of how people process evidence and then update their beliefs make different predictions, especially about one-sided evidence, which is rarely examined. We presented subjects with mu...