Arguments and Their Strength: Revisiting Pollock's Anti-Probabilistic Starting Points

Bart Verheij

Pollock's concepts of reasons and defeaters have been widely adopted, but his anti-probabilistic treatment of argument strength less so. After an explanation of how Pollock's concerns can be addressed probabilistically, the paper continues with a formal treatment of reasons, defeaters, and argument strength, while remaining within standard probability theory and its underlying classical logic. Pollock studied puzzles about self-defeat and collective defeat (associated with the lottery paradox), and it is shown how these can be addressed probabilistically. A normative framework for arguments and their strength, as provided here, is needed for the development of rationality support tools for the prevention of reasoning errors.

Manuscript (in PDF-format)

Reference:
Verheij, B. (2014). Arguments and Their Strength: Revisiting Pollock's Anti-Probabilistic Starting Points. Computational Models of Argument. Proceedings of COMMA 2014 (eds. Parsons, S., Oren, N., Reed, C., & Cerutti, F.), 433-444. Amsterdam: IOS Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-436-7-433


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