It is a piece of idle senthentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, or prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application oflegal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in th...

This paper develops a theory of the interaction between appropriative conflict and economic growth. Appropriative conflict, as measured by the diversion of resources, is viewed as the cost of securing effective property rights. We identify conditions under which conflict rises or falls as the rate of economic growth improves. The main implication of the analysis is that if the quality of proper...

In everyday disputes, and especially political disputes, people often use analogical arguments to support their views. For example, many of the arguments about the War in Iraq were regularly bolstered by analogical comparisons to WWII and Vietnam. Though logic and philosophy has always viewed analogical argumentation as suspect, analogical thinking has recently been studied and modelled extensi...

In this paper a brief history of the Phillips curve from Fisher (1973 [1926]) to the FriedmanPhelps natural rate hypothesis is sketched. Empirical evidence from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States during the latter half of the 20th century in support of a positive long-run relationship between inflation and unemployment is presented. In order to reconcile the predominant t...

Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence are advanced to bolster the claim that direct political participation via referenda and initiatives constitutes an advanced form of democracy with beneficial effects on Transition Countries. Direct democracy raises trust and honesty and improves social outcomes. Per capita incomes and subjective well-being are raised. Standard arguments against direc...

Introduction This progress report proceeds from a political ecology vantage point to explore the engagement by political ecologists with human health. Literature in political ecology, with an explicit interest in issues of health, remains a somewhat recent and narrow field of enquiry within the discipline. This paper explores this body of literature within its broader intellectual terrain along...

Argumentative discourse contains not only language expressing claims and evidence, but also language used to organize these claims and pieces of evidence. Differentiating between the two may be useful for many applications, such as those that focus on the content (e.g., relation extraction) of arguments and those that focus on the structure of arguments (e.g., automated essay scoring). We propo...