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The paper focuses on conflicts about an already negotiated compromise, taking as its example a debate in Dutch parliament about the approval of the Paris Agreement on climate change of 2015. It deals with a variety of worries that opponents of approval may advance and the arguments in its defense thus invited. It concludes with a profile of dialogue providing reasonable options for those involved in such a conflict.

Criticism may degenerate into quibbling or nitpicking. How can discussants keep quibblers under control? In the paper we investigate cases in which a battle about words replaces a discussion of the matters that are actually at issue as well as cases in which a battle about minor objections replaces a discussion of the major issues. We survey some lines of discussion dealing with these situations in profiles of dialogue.

Defining the rational belief state of an agent in terms of her initial or a priori belief state as well as her total evidence can help to address a number of important philosophical problems. In this paper, I discuss how this strategy can be applied to cases in which evidence is uncertain. I argue that taking evidence to be uncertain allows us to uniquely determine an agent’s subjective a priori belief state from her present beliefs and her total evidence. However, this also undermines a common assumption on the independence evidence.

The biennial DEON conferences are designed to promote interdisciplinary cooperation amongst scholars interested in linking the formal-logical study of normative concepts and normative systems with computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, organization theory and law. In addition to these general themes, DEON 2016 encouraged a special focus on the topic 'Reasons, Argumentation and Justification.'

Contemporary theory of argumentation offers many insights about fallacies and the ways to react to them. But what if, in a public controversy, it is not a matter of occasional derailments but one party is systematically trivializing the other party’s problems or resorting to pressure in the form of threats or blackmail? Can this be countered by the tools of reason? To gain some grasp of this issue, we describe a number of strategies used in the public controversy about induced earthquakes in Groningen. We check whether these strategies are fair, i.e. balanced, transparent, and tolerant. We also investigate the effects of the choice for a particular kind of strategy. It appears that, in circumstances, choosing a fair strategy may be detrimental for resolving the controversy and choosing an unfair one beneficial. Following up ideas from social psychology and political science, we formulate some guidelines for the choice of strategies. At the end we stress the importance – especially for those who carry little weight – of having a society in which the knowledge and skills needed for assessing the fairness of strategies is widespread.

In this paper we review a 1992 excursion of Jean Paul Van Bendegem into physics, ‘How Infinities Cause Problems in Classical Physical Theories’, in the light of two later models concerning colliding balls, of Pérez Laraudogoitia and of Alper and Bridger, respectively. We show that Van Bendegem anticipated the model of Alper and Bridger by six years, but we also argue that his conditions for the avoidance of problems in these models are not entirely adequate. For although a veto on actual infinity seems to be required, allowing a potential infinity remains a viable option.

Non-symmetric incompatibility relations, or non-symmetric compatibility relations, are a standard method for introducing a split negation pair on a frame. Another standard method is to reject commutation for the frame. The first task is to examine the relationship between non-symmetric incompatibility relations and non-symmetric compatibility relations and commutation failure on frames. The second task is to look at the sort of points that may constitute such frames. Taking the points as information states, what type of information states may operate in non-symmetric incompatibility/compatibility environments? The proposal made here is that databases consisting of sub-propositional information states, or data-points, are a respectable place to start.

We give a simple definition of validity for syllogisms involving necessary and assertoric premises which validates all and only the Aristotelian apodeictic syllogisms.

Probabilistic methods are increasingly becoming an important tool in a variety of disciplines including computer science, mathematics, artificial intelligence, epistemology, game and decision theory and linguistics. In addition to the discussion on applications of probabilistic methods there is an important philosophical debate concerning the precise meaning and interpretation of probabilistic and statistical statements. This volume contains fully refereed versions of papers presented at the sixth installment of the conference series Foundations of the Formal Sciences (FotFS) which was an interdisciplinary venue bringing together researchers using probabilistic and statistical methods in their respective fields and researchers who are concerned with the philosophical interpretation of probability and statistics to exchange ideas, approaches and techniques. The conference FotFS VI facilitated discussions about the applicability of probabilistic methods and helped to ground foundational debates with concerns for practitioners of probabilistic methods.