Si es verdad que la «medicina ha salvado vida de ética» –para usar sugestiva fórmula Stephen Toulmin 2 – al plantearle problemas normativos concretos han obligado a los filósofos abandonar el no siempre muy fecundo nivel metaética, hay duda progreso técnica médica se puesto mucho más difícil.

In 1958, Stephen Edelston Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument saw the light of day. This book has never been out of print; an updated second edition appeared in 2003. It has influenced, and continues to influence, researchers in speech communication and philosophy, and also in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology and application domains such as law and medicine. In The Uses of Argument Toul...

social and intellectual history of medicine and science, citing the work of J Gabbay, Gerald Geison, June Goodfield, Joel Howell, Christopher Lawrence, Stephen Toulmin, and George Weisz. The doubly successful result will help to orient the non-medical reader to the technical aspects of his subject, and it will invite clinicians to appreciate the merits of theoretical analysis and interpretation...

The recent redefinition of 'planet' that excludes Pluto as a planet led to controversy that provides a case study of how competing scientific definitions can be supported by characteristic types of evidence. An argumentation scheme from Hastings is used to analyze argument from verbal classification as a form of inference used in rational argumentation. The Toulmin-style format is compared to m...

In 1958, Toulmin published The Uses of Argument. Although this anti-formalistic monograph initially received mixed reviews (see section 2 of [20] for Toulmin’s own recounting of the reception of his book), it has become a classical text on argumentation, and the number of references to the book (when writing these words1 — by a nice numerological coincidence — 1958) continues to grow (see [7] a...

This paper proposes using structured informal argumentation to assist with determining whether the security requirements for a system satisfy the security goals, and whether an eventual realized system can satisfy the security requirements. We call these arguments 'satisfaction arguments', and propose a systematic approach for their construction. A satisfaction argument is typically probabilist...

Many scientific disciplines use n samples to extrapolate information on the species composition of additional unobservable samples. Given a population with unknown species proportions (pi)i≥1, we consider the problem of estimating: i) the number Uλn,r of unseen species with frequency r ≥ 1 in an additional sample of size λn; ii) the probability Vλn,r of discovering at the (λn + n + 1)-th draw a...