This essay takes issue with Alasdair MacIntyre’s denial that teaching is a practice. It does so less by appeal to MacIntyre’s concept of practice than by criticism of his conception of teaching. It argues that this conception, as reconstructed from adversions to teaching in a range of his writings, does less than justice to what good teachers accomplish; and that, if this inadequacy is rectifie...

This paper proposes using both formal and structured informal arguments to show that an eventual realized system can satisfy its security requirements. These arguments, called 'satisfaction arguments', consist of two parts: a formal argument based upon claims about domain properties, and a set of informal arguments that justify the claims. Building on our earlier work on trust assumptions and s...

A major problem that has been thought to stand in the way of an adequate account of hypothesis appraisal may be termed the alternative hypothesis objection: that whatever rule is specified for positively appraising H, there will always be rival hypotheses that satisfy the rule equally well. Evidence in accordance with hypothesis H cannot really count in favor of H, it is objected, if it counts ...

This article proposes a cost-benefit analysis of argumentation, with the aim of highlighting the strategic considerations that govern the agent’s decision to argue – or not. In spite of its paramount importance, the topic of argumentative decision-making has not received substantial attention in argumentation theories so far. We offer an explanation for this lack of consideration, and propose a...