Defeasible Reasoning

In logic, defeasible reasoning is a kind of reasoning that is rationally compelling, though not deductively valid. Defeasible reasoning is a particular kind of non-demonstrative reasoning, where the reasoning does not produce a full, complete, or final demonstration of a claim, i.e., where fallibility and corrigibility of a conclusion are acknowledged. In other words, defeasible reasoning produces a contingent statement or claim.

Defeasible reasoning finds its fullest expression in jurisprudence, ethics and moral philosophy, epistemology, pragmatics and conversational conventions in linguistics, constructivist decision theories, and in knowledge representation and planning in artificial intelligence. It is also closely identified with prima facie (presumptive) reasoning (i.e., reasoning on the "face" of evidence), and ceteris paribus (default) reasoning (i.e., reasoning, all things "being equal").

Positive Space

Timewave is the third episode in Series XII of Red Dwarf.

A ship from the 23rd century, the SS Enconium, is washed up from the past, and the Dwarfers run into a crew where

• ineptitude is to be tolerated by law, 
• audacious self-expression is encouraged, and 
• all forms of criticism are illegal.

Meaning At Risk

Word Of The Day

MUMPSIMUS – Someone who obstinately sticks to old ways or ideas in spite of all the evidence showing that they're wrong.

Having Been Had

The Interpersonal Constructs The Personal

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 511):

Interpersonally, the grammar is not a theory but a way of doing; it is our construction of social relationships, both those that define society and our own place in it, and those that pertain to the immediate dialogic situation. This constitutes the "interpersonal" metafunction, whereby language constructs our social collective and, thereby, our personal being. The word "construct" is used to suggest a form of enactment — though something on which we inevitably build a theory, of ourself and the various "others" to whom we relate.

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 583):

in the interpersonal mode we enact ourselves as speakers interacting with addressees;

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 583):

If we move outside the ideational metafunction to the interpersonal, the resource through which we interact with other people, we find that here we are acting out our conscious selves — "modelling" consciousness not by construing it but by enacting it.

No Problem