The existence of null arguments in Athabascan languages, and other polysynthetic languages, is a debated topic. We argue that, if the agreement on the verb is the argument, the so-called Pronominal Argument Hypothesis, languages such as Navajo do not have null arguments in the traditional sense. We then outline the diachrony of Athabascan object marking on the verb (by looking at the various co...

After determining one set of skills that we hoped our students were learning in the introductory philosophy class at Carnegie Mellon University, we designed an experiment to test whether they were actually learning these skills. In addition, there were four sections of this course in the Spring of 2004, and the students in Section 1 were taught the material using argument diagrams as a tool to ...

The slippery slope argument (SSA) is generally treated as a fallacy by both traditional and contemporary theories of argumentation, but is frequently used and widely accepted in applied reasoning domains. Experiment 1 tests the hypothesis that SSAs are not perceived as universally weak arguments. The results provide the first empirical demonstration that SSAs vary predictably in their subjectiv...

Entire matrix-valued functions of a complex argument (entire matrix pencils) are considered. Bounds for spectral variations of pencils are derived. In particular, approximations of entire pencils by polynomial pencils are investigated. Our results are new even for polynomial pencils. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusi...

BACKGROUND Validity evidence based on the internal structure of an assessment is one of the five forms of validity evidence stipulated in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing of the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education. In this paper, we describe the concepts underlying internal structu...

Permutation tests are often presented in a rather casual manner, in both introductory and advanced statistics textbooks. The appeal of the cleverness of the procedure seems to replace the need for a rigorous argument that it produces valid hypothesis tests. The consequence of this educational failing has been a widespread belief in a “permutation principle”, which is supposed invariably to give...

Anselm’s Ontological Argument fails, but not for any of the various reasons commonly adduced. In particular, its failure has nothing to do with violating deep Kantian principles by treating ‘exists’ as a predicate or making reference to ‘Meinongian’ entities. Its one fatal flaw, so far from being metaphysically deep, is in fact logically shallow, deriving from a subtle scope ambiguity in Anselm...

This article evaluates a validity argument for the degree towhich assessment tasks are able to provide evidence about knowledge that fuses information from a progression of core disciplinary ideas in ecology and a progression for the scientific practice of developing evidence-based explanations. The article describes the interpretive framework for the argument, including evidence for howwell th...

We have implemented a translator that translates Carneades Argument Graphs as specified in the LKIF files of the Carneades editor to a database specification of the Argument Interchange Format and vice versa. In this paper the algorithms for this translation are presented.