Matters For Argument

Why the Difference between Explanation and Argument Matters to Science Education

Contributing to the recent debate on whether or not explanations ought to be differentiated from arguments, this article argues that the distinction matters to science education. I articulate the distinction in terms of explanations and arguments having to meet different standards of adequacy. Standards of explanatory adequacy are important because they correspond to what counts as a good expla...

Skin matters! The role of keratinocytes in nociception: a rational argument for the development of topical analgesics

Treatment of neuropathic pain using topical formulations is still in its infancy. Only few topical analgesic formulations have become available for clinical use, and among these, analgesic creams are still rare. This is unfortunate because analgesic creams offer a number of advantages over patches, such as convenience, ease of adapting the frequency of application, and dose, and "rubbing cream ...

Argument or no argument ?

We will call such adjuncts instances of the X or no X construction It was suggested in the middle 1980s by Alexis Manaster-Ramer that well-formed instances of X or no X involve a string X of unbounded length preceding or no, with an exact copy following (for a brief allusion to it in print, see Manaster-Ramer 1986). This claim has received hardly any discussion at all in the subsequent literatu...

An Argument for Argument Ellipsis from -sika NPIs

"PageRank" for Argument Relevance

Future search engines are expected to deliver pro and con arguments in response to queries on controversial topics. While argument mining is now in the focus of research, the question of how to retrieve the relevant arguments remains open. This paper proposes a radical model to assess relevance objectively at web scale: the relevance of an argument’s conclusion is decided by what other argument...