Constitutional silence on election postponement in Ethiopia amidst a pandemic: A critique of constitutional interpretation

Election postponement in Ethiopia, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has raised critical constitutional questions that have never been really thought before in the countrys constitutional law jurisprudence. This is because the state of emergency measure in Ethiopia, due to the spread of COVID-19, is in conflict with constitutional deadlines for elections. The constitutional lacuna is complicated by the absence of explicit constitutional provisions that indisputably govern election postponement. Although any legal measures to postpone election schedule and pass constitutional deadlock is far from simple, the Ethiopian government has suggested four possible options to the constitutional dilemma: dissolving the parliament, declaring state of emergency, amendment of the Constitution and constitutional interpretation. Finally, the House of Federation (HoF), the Ethiopian upper House entrusted to interpret the constitution decided and postponed the election indefinitely until the pandemic no longer poses a risk to public health confirmed by the parliament which has direct vested interest in the outcome. This research investigates whether the constitutional interpretation option adheres to the premises of the Ethiopian Constitution or is it extra constitutional. Accordingly, the HoF provided superficial analysis and fallacious reasoning and failed to meaningfully grapple with the serious constitutional issues. The constitutional interpretation is not constitutionally bound and is defective. The manner the HoF managed the constitutional vacuum concerning election postponement, indisputably, was constitutional interpretation by name but a political decision in practice.

THE NEXUS BETWEEN LOGIC AND GENERAL STUDIES

Logic, a branch of philosophy, is essentially concerned with one’s ability to reason well. It provides structured rules and principles that act as guides for effective reasoning. As such the correctness or incorrectness of any kind of reasoning can easily be verified by subjecting them to logical techniques and methods. The paper conceptualises general studies as a set of prescribed courses available in a Nigerian tertiary institution, outside a student’s area of specialisation that must be registered for and passed, usually, in the first and second years of study. The essence is to ensure that students experience balanced, rounded education and to ensure that scholarship is made relevant to the pressing needs of the society. The paper locates the bond between logic and general studies based on the fact that logic permeates all the courses taught as General Studies and, indeed, all the courses taught in the university be it medicine, geography, architecture. In a knowledge-based environment, the need for effective communication is critical and inevitable. This means that both in the delivery of knowledge as well as its acquisition, care should be taken to avoid fallacious reasoning and deception by the slippery nature and use of words. It is for this reason that a rudimentary knowledge of logic is a prerequisite for every discipline. The paper adopts an analytical and comparative method. Philosophical analysis and reflection are applied in order to evaluate and highlight the importance of logic to other disciplines. Its comparative character helps to demonstrate why logic, and no any other discipline, is most suited to act as the foundation for all other disciplines. In all, the paper demonstrates that for effective teaching and learning to take place in other disciplines, logic is essential. It also underscores the strong nexus between logic and general studies. Finally, it shows how logic can help in enriching other disciplines.

Does the Intuition of Distinctness Result from Valid Reasoning? – Reply to Kammerer

According to an influential physicalist view, the intuition of distinctness is a cognitive illusion in the sense that it results from fallacious reasoning: we erroneously infer that the referents of phenomenal and physical concepts are different, from the fact that there is a certain difference between our uses of those concepts. (Kammerer, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10:649–667, 2019) has recently argued, however, that it is psychologically implausible that the intuition of distinctness results from a fallacy: the reasoning process leading to this intuition is, in several psychological respects, similar to valid reasoning and dissimilar to typical fallacies, which gives us a reason to think that this process is a case of valid reasoning. I argue that there are no psychological reasons to think that the process underlying the intuition of distinctness (or at least the crucial part of this process) is a case of valid reasoning. There is, in fact, only one crucial psychological respect in which this process resembles valid reasoning, and although the two processes are similar in one crucial respect, this does not rule out that the intuition of distinctness results from a fallacy, namely, the sort of fallacious reasoning that physicalists have in mind. Furthermore, since the process underlying the intuition of distinctness resembles typical fallacies in one crucial respect, there is a reason to think that the intuition of distinctness does result from a fallacy.

Do informal reasoning fallacies really shape decisions? Experimental evidence

Informal reasoning fallacies belong to a persuasive tactic, leading to a conclusion that is not supported by premises but reached through emotions and/or misleading and incomplete information. Previous research focused on the ability to recognize informal reasoning fallacies. However, the recognition itself does not necessarily mean immunity to their influence on decisions made. An experiment was designed to study the relationship between the presence of informal reasoning fallacies and a consequent decision. Having conducted paired comparisons of distributions, we have found some support for the hypothesis that informal reasoning fallacies affect decision-making more substantially than non-fallacious reasoning—strong support in the case of a slippery slope, weak in that of appeal to fear, anecdotal evidence argument defying evaluation. Numeracy and cognitive reflection seem to be associated with higher resistance to the slippery slope, but do not diminish appeal to fear.

GOD, SCIENCE, AND METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM

In this paper, I call into question a commonly assumed principle in science known as methodological naturalism, which is the idea that science should only accept natural, as opposed to supernatural, explanations. In support of MN, two arguments are commonly thrown against the idea of theistic explanation in science: the science stopper argument and the God-of-the-gaps argument. The science stopper argument states that appealing to theistic explanations hinders science from making steady progress; it simply stops science from its tracks. In other words, abandoning MN spells the death of science. The God-of-the-gaps argument states that appealing to God when explaining phenomenon is a form of an argument from ignorance, what critics call God-of-the-gaps thinking, which is considered to be fallacious reasoning. Any gap in nature that is explained by God, so the argument goes, is simply an appeal to our ignorance that we have no yet found the correct explanation to such natural mystery. In this scenario, an appeal to God is assumed to simply show our lack of knowledge with regard to the workings of nature. After introducing these arguments, I assess their strength by looking at the history of methodological naturalism. I then show how the history of science does not only fail to support these arguments but actually refutes them.

Indirect illusory inferences from disjunction: a new bridge between deductive inference and representativeness

We provide a new link between deductive and probabilistic reasoning fallacies. Illusory inferences from disjunction are a broad class of deductive fallacies traditionally explained by recourse to a matching procedure that looks for content overlap between premises. In two behavioral experiments, we show that this phenomenon is instead sensitive to real-world causal dependencies and not to exact content overlap. A group of participants rated the strength of the causal dependence between pairs of sentences. This measure is a near perfect predictor of fallacious reasoning by an independent group of participants in illusory inference tasks with the same materials. In light of these results, we argue that all extant accounts of these deductive fallacies require non-trivial adjustments. Crucially, these novel indirect illusory inferences from disjunction bear a structural similarity to seemingly unrelated probabilistic reasoning problems, in particular the conjunction fallacy from the heuristics and biases literature. This structural connection was entirely obscure in previous work on these deductive problems, due to the theoretical and empirical focus on content overlap. We argue that this structural parallelism provides arguments against the need for rich descriptions and individuating information in the conjunction fallacy, and we outline a unified theory of deductive illusory inferences from disjunction and the conjunction fallacy, in terms of Bayesian confirmation theory.

The Language of Propaganda in President Bush Jr. Political Speech

The study of this article was set out to identify the use of the language of propaganda in Bush’s political speech. It was purposed to clarify the propaganda techniques applied by Bush in order to have one point of view among the audiences. The study focused on how the techniques of propaganda occurred within Bush Jr.’s speech in which he attempted to explain the different sides of who is combating terrorism and who is performing terror. The material of analysis was the speech delivered by Bush Jr. in front of the Military Officers Association of America Meeting in 2006. This article then found that the propagandist tries to control the relationship between information and audiences’ mind through the usage of language in their political speech. It was argued that propaganda can also effectively work toward almost all types of audiences, whereas the strategy of propaganda was mostly creating a fallacious reasoning connection concerning the topics being discussed.

Aspects of relevance in the Romanian political discourse

This paper investigates political discourse from the perspective of relevance theory in relation to the function of reasonable persuasion oriented towards voters. The research’ objectives are to identify and to describe: 1) the mechanisms of persuasion used in election campaign speeches; 2) the meta-strategy of miming dialogue; 3) the manner in which political discourse infringes upon the principles of relevance. The accomplishment of the objectives requires a two-fold methodology: rhetorical and linguistic by means of instruments of lexical-semantic, pragma-stylistic and logical-argumentative analysis. The research is focused on political election campaigns speeches: slogans and speeches of the Romanian recent election campaigns. The most frequently encountered discourse strategies are: i) the use of various types of fallacious reasoning and ii) vague language.