The teleological argument has received a resurgence in recent years. This is thanks to cosmological data which appears offer new evidence indicate that the existence of life result contrivance face staggering improbability. Richard Swinburne argues cosmic fine-tuning gives us good believe creator God classical theism, who reasons create human agents. I assess Swinburne’s use “principle simplici...

In dealing with model predictive controllers (MPC), controller tuning is a key design step. Various tuning methods are proposed in the literature which can be categorized as heuristic, numerical and analytical methods. Among the available tuning methods, analytical approaches are more interesting and useful. This paper is based on a proposed analytical MPC tuning approach for plants can be appr...

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...

This paper examines probabilistic versions of the fine-tuning argument for design (FTA), with an emphasis on the interpretation of the probability statements involved in such arguments. Three categories of probability are considered: physical, epistemic, and logical. Of the three possibilities, I argue that only logical probability could possibly support a cogent probabilistic FTA. However, wit...

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...