Big Data: truth, quasi-truth or post-truth?

Truth-bearers or Truth-makers?

Quasi - truth and Quantum Mechanics

Since its early formulation, non-relativistic quantum mechanics (QM) has been the source of sustained controversy about its foundation. Despite its impressive empirical success, several foundational issues have not been settled by the theory: What exactly happens with the observables when a quantum system is not being measured? And what exactly happens during measurement? What is the nature of ...

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth

This discussion aims to provide the occasional medical expert witness with background knowledge of the adversarial court system and the role of the medical expert witness within it. The parallel evolution of the adversarial and inquisitorial legal systems has been more out of tradition rather than any systematic review of the effectiveness of one system or the other. Both legal systems have the...

Empiricism, Conservativeness and Quasi-Truth

A first step is taken towards articulating a constructive empiricist philosophy of mathematics, thus extending van Fraassen's account to this domain. In order to do so, I adapt Field's nominalisation programme, making it compatible with an empiricist stance. Two changes are introduced: (a) Instead of taking conservativeness as the norm of mathematics, the empiricist countenances the weaker noti...

Truth or Urban Legend?

It has become widely accepted that correlations between variables measured with the same method, usually self-report surveys, are inflated due to the action of common method variance (CMV), despite a number of sources that suggest the problem is overstated. The author argues that the popular position suggesting CMV automatically affects variables measured with the same method is a distortion an...