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Record W1588067599 · doi:10.22329/il.v22i1.2571

Are Some Modus Ponens Arguments Deductively Invalid?

2001· article· en· W1588067599 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Douglas Walton

Bibliographic record

VenueInformal Logic · 2001
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicLogic, Reasoning, and Knowledge
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Winnipeg
Fundersnot available
KeywordsModus ponensDefeasible estateEpistemologyMathematicsPhilosophyCalculus (dental)InferenceMedicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article concerns the structure of defeasible arguments like: 'If Bob has red spots, Bob has the measles; Bob has red spots; therefore Bob has the measles.' The issue is whether such arguments have the form of modus ponens or not. Either way there is a problem. If they don't have the form of modus ponens, the common opinion to the contrary taught in leading logic textbooks is wrong. But if they do have the form of modus ponens, doubts are raised about the conventional dogma that all arguments having the form of modus ponens are deductively valid. By carefully examining arguments on both sides of the issue, reasonable doubts are raised about the view that all arguments having a modus ponens form are valid.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.021
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.096
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.021
Threshold uncertainty score0.110

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0210.096
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.003
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0060.023
Scholarly communication0.0100.020
Open science0.0050.006
Research integrity0.0100.012
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.003

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.039
GPT teacher head0.257
Teacher spread0.218 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations22
Published2001
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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