There is no statutory requirement that formal logic be adhered to during examination of patent claims. Examiners and patent practitioners are free to use a wide variety of discussion and argument ...

To persuade you, people often try to use logical fallacies (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld) When people are trying to persuade you, they sometimes reach for underhand tricks like the 'appeal to ignorance' ...

It seems that just about everyone in the country knew that the Panthers should go for it on fourth down except for the one man who counted: Carolina coach Ron Rivera. My own analysis agrees with that ...

The conjunction and disjunction fallacies are famous for revealing the limits of human reasoning about probability. This can be measured by telling people a short story about a character and then ...

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. —Sun Tzu Source: Viktor Vasnetsov/Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain) The enemies of rational thought can take ...

This paper takes issue with a recent proposal due to Shogenji (Synthese 184:29—48, 2012). In his paper, Shogenji introduces J, a normatively motivated formal measure of justification (and of ...