One either acquires reasons for accepting something incompatible with one's initial belief (rebutting defeater) or one loses one's grounds for holding the initial belief (undercutting defeater).
Rebutting this suspicion and establishing a normative argument against privately inflicted criminal sanctions requires characterizing criminal sanctions in a way that is independent of the agent who inflicts these sanctions.
Pollock (1987, 1992) conceptualises the notions of reasons, prima facie reasons, defeaters, rebutting defeaters and undercutting defeaters, in terms of formal logic.
Davis offers a qualified endorsement of both, plausibly rebutting the more familiar objections.
To clarify the distinction between negative and positive apologetics, it is helpful to consider the concept of defeaters, especially the distinction between undercutting and rebutting defeaters.
Arguments may compete, rebutting against each other, so a process of argumentation is a natural result of the search for arguments.
Arguments are said to be rebutting if they have contradictory conclusions.
Taylor offers both an undercutting and a rebutting defeater of the premiss that an actual infinite cannot exist.
