In a multi-study naturalistic quasi-experiment involving 269 students in a semester-long introductory philosophy course, we investigated the effect of teaching argument diagramming (AD) on students’ scores on argument analysis tasks. An argument diagram is a visual representation of the content and structure of an argument. In each study, all of the students completed preand posttests containin...

A conflicting knowledge base can be seen abstractly as a set of arguments and a binary relation characterising conflict among them. There may be multiple plausible ways to evaluate conflicting arguments. In this paper, we ask: given a set of agents, each with a legitimate subjective evaluation of a set of arguments, how can they reach a collective evaluation of those arguments? After formally d...

Baker (Mind 114:223–238, 2005; Brit J Philos Sci 60:611–633, 2009) has recently defended what he calls the “enhanced” version of the indispensability argument for mathematical Platonism. In this paper I demonstrate that the nominalist can respond to Baker’s argument. First, I outline Baker’s argument in more detail before providing a nominalistically acceptable paraphrase of prime-number talk. ...

This paper looks at the need for a better understanding of the impediments to critical thinking in relation to graduate student work. The paper argues that a distinction is needed between two vectors that influence student writing: (1) the word-level sentence-level vector; and (2) the grammar inferencing vector. It is suggested that much of the work being done to assist students is only done on...

The argument from fine tuning is supposed to establish the existence of God from the fact that the evolution of carbon-based life requires the laws of physics and the boundary conditions of the universe to be more or less as they are. We demonstrate that this argument fails. In particular, we focus on problems associated with the role probabilities play in the argument. We show that, even grant...

HMEANT (Lo and Wu, 2011a) is a manual MT evaluation technique that focuses on predicate-argument structure of the sentence. We relate HMEANT to an established linguistic theory, highlighting the possibilities of reusing existing knowledge and resources for interpreting and automating HMEANT. We apply HMEANT to a new language, Czech in particular, by evaluating a set of Englishto-Czech MT system...