Bibliographic record
Abstract
This lecture considers the place of Reductio ad Absurdum (RAA) in an informal theory of argumentation.It asks the question: How should RAA be classified in modern argumentation theory?I'm particularly interested in how this argument would fit in the pragmadialectical, threefold of argumentation schemes.I willat least provisionallyargue that informal use of RAA consists of three kinds of reasoning, one of which belongs to the argumentation scheme of sign, one of which belongs to the argumentation scheme of comparison, and one of which is not an argumentation scheme, but consists in pointing out inconsistencies in the commitments of the opponent.This typology differs from that made by others (Ryle, 1945, p. 6; Groarke, Tindale & Fisher, 1997, p. 177; Schwed, 1999, p. 734-735).Although this lecture is not concerned with legal reasoning, its occasion is.In jurisprudential literature the term RAA is used to indicate reasoning which makes an appeal to the absurd consequences of an initial premise (Alexy, 1989, p. 283; Golding, 1884, p. 38, 59; MacCormick, 1978, p. 114 ff.).With this form of reasoning a certain interpretation of a legal rule is rejected on the grounds of its consequences, which would be unacceptable, meaningless, incomprehensible or the like (Alexy, 1989, p. 283).This definition leaves room not only for 'ordinary' arguments by which an appeal is made to undesirable consequences but also for arguments that appeal to other kinds of consequences-for example: artificial insemination by donor cannot be a ground for adultery, for, if it were, a consequence would be that it is possible to commit adultery with a dead person (MacCormick, 1978, p. 148).In this example a certain interpretation is denied because its consequence is not just undesirable but creates a legal inconsistency, because it contradicts well-known juridical facts.The differences in kinds of consequences led Kloosterhuis (2003) to conclude that we should distinguish between two kinds of RAA.The firstwhich he calls the wider sense of RAA consists of pragmatic argumentation.The secondwhich he calls the strict sense of RAAcan be classified as a contextual-harmonization argument (MacCormick & Summers, 1991, p. 513): the kind of argument by which it is determined whether a certain interpretation fits within the legal system.However, in my view there is no reason to use the name RAA for specific instances of pragmatic argumentation.Pragmatic argumentation is just pragmatic argumentation.In RAA the relationship between antecedent and consequence cannot be adequately characterised in terms of causality.When it is argued that artificial insemination by donor cannot be a ground for adultery, for, if it were, the consequence would be that one can commit adultery
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".