Argumentation is an important way to reach a new understanding. Strongly caring about an issue, which is often evident when dealing with controversial issues, has been shown to lead to biases in argumentation. We suggest that people are not well calibrated in assessing their ability to justify a position through argumentation, an effect we call the illusion of argument justification. Furthermor...

Document drafting|an important problem-solving task of professionals in a wide variety of elds|typiies a design task requiring complex adaptation for case reuse. This paper proposes a framework for document reuse based on an explicit representation of the illocutionary and rhetorical structure underlying documents. Explicit representation of this structure facilitates (1) interpretation of prev...

number of things I believed to be true. A few examples: I believed I was in Port aux Basques, Newfoundland. I believed I was caught up on my student loan payments. I believed that, when I was seven, a dog named Tuffy lived across the street with a family whose name I can’t recall. I believed all these things, but I was less confident in some of those beliefs than others. Why? One way of explain...

Liberal multicultural theories developed in late twenty-first century aims to ensure the rights of the minorities, social justice and harmony in liberal societies. Will Kymlicka is the leading philosopher in this field. He advocates minority rights, their autonomy and the way minority groups can be accommodated in a liberal society with their distinct cultural identity. Besides him, there are o...

The uncompromising ethos of pure mathematics in the early post-war period was that any theorem should be provided with a proof which the reader could and should check. Two things have made this no longer realistic: (i) the appearance of increasingly long and complicated proofs and (ii) the involvement of computers. This paper discusses what compromises the mathematical community needs to make a...

The sealing of rotating equipment has always presented a special challenge for rotating equipment manufacturers and end users. Shaft seals are provided to restrict or prevent the escape of process or sealing fluids to atmosphere. They are required to comply with environmental regulations, prevent monetary losses, and for personnel safety. Dry gas seal technology has demonstrated reliability and...

This paper disputes the widely held view that one cannot establish the reliability of a belief-forming process with the use of beliefs that are obtained by that very process since such self-dependent justification is circular. Harold Brown ([1993]) argued in this journal that some cases of self-dependent justification are legitimate despite their circularity. I argue instead that under appropri...

We examine the proof-theoretic verificationist justification procedure proposed by Michael Dummett. After some scrutiny, two distinct interpretations with respect to bases are advanced: the independent and the dependent interpretation. We argue that both are unacceptable as a semantics for propositional intuitionistic logic.