The validity of functional explanations as they are commonly used in psychology has recently come under attack. Kim’s supervenience argument purports to prove that higher-level generalizations have no causal powers of their own, and hence are explanatorily irrelevant. In a nutshell, the supervenience argument forces us to either embrace epiphenomenalism of higherlevel properties, or accept Kim’...

In most attempts to model legal systems as formal argumentation systems, legal norms are viewed as an argumentation’s system inference rules. Since in formal argumentation systems inference rules are generally assumed to be fixed and independent from the inferences they enable, this approach fails to capture the dialectical connection between norms and arguments, where on the one hand legal arg...

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...

In 1983, Popper and Miller published in Nature a new argument against inductive probability. There followed, the next year, a discussion of the validity of the argument in the pages of the same journal involving Good, Jeffrey, and Levi as well as Popper and Miller themselves. This has led in turn to still further discussions of the argument. Those who are critical include Redhead (1985) and Dun...

A coamoeba is the image of a subvariety of a complex torus under the argument map to the real torus. We describe the structure of the boundary of the coamoeba of a variety, which we relate to its logarithmic limit set. Detailed examples of lines in three-dimensional space illustrate and motivate these results.

1. For consistency and to avoid confusions, the term dimension is used across PCA, CFA, and RSM analyese. Validity evidence is provided for a Persian blog attitude questionnaire (P-BAQ). P-BAQ was administered to 565 Iranians and factor analysis and rating scale model identified affective, behavioral, and perseverance, and confidence dimensions underlying the data. P-BAQ's validity argument was...