Causal grounds for negative truths

How negative truths are made true

Aaron M. Griffith Identifying plausible truthmakers for negative truths has been a serious and perennial problem for truthmaker theory. I argue here that negative truths (in particular contingent negative existential truths) are indeed made true but not in the way that positive truths are. I rely on a distinction between “existence-independence” and “variation-independence” drawn by Hofmann and...

Erratum to: How negative truths are made true

The second sentence on page 317 reads “The challenge is that, prima facie, it is hard to see how a negative truth, e.g., of something could be (or even needs to be) made true by the existence of some entity”. This sentence should read “The challenge is that, prima facie, it is hard to see how a negative truth, e.g., that is concerned with the non-e...

Coffee: grounds for concern?

C aff eine is the most widely ingested nonregulated substance on earth. A major portion of this drug is consumed as coff ee, with an annual production of over 7.8 million metric tons. Over 2.5 billion cups of coff ee are consumed worldwide each day. Given its popularity, it is hard to conceive of how Western civilization might begin each workday without this critical liquid allotment. Despite t...

New Grounds for Drinking Coffee

Follicular lymphoma: grounds for optimism.

The fact that follicular lymphoma is characterized by a specific immune phenotype and a nonrandom chromosomal translocation which may be detected at the molecular level makes it possible to design novel therapeutic strategies for curative therapy. Molecular markers may be used to test hypotheses. Some current causes for optimism are reviewed.