Common Sense and Medical Practice

Flipping ORs: does this common practice make business sense?

The Bayesian Basis of Common Sense Medical Diagnosis

In this paper we will argue that while objection (1) is , . . correct, (2) is not, making (1) moot. Furthermore, while (3) seems to be valid, even there, Bayesian statistics is perfectly compatible with various heuristic solutions to the multiple-disease problem. To reject Bayesian statistics on the basis of (3) would be like rejecting closedform solutions to differential equations because the ...

Common sense and "relevance"

Introduction The "relevance" logicians of North America and the "relevant" logicians of the Antipodes have long claimed that their logical systems are in better agreement with common sense than is classical logic. The present paper is a critical examination of such claims. Though it is part of an on-going debate between classical and relevantistic logicians, I have tried to keep my discussion o...

Common Sense and Nonsense

The irrepressible Bernard E. Rollin has written a lively, provocative, and scholarly book on several pivotal bioethical issues in nonhuman animal research. Professor Rollin of Colorado State University asksand answers whether nonhuman animals think, feel, and suffer. Rollin asks whether the prevailing scientific justification for banning nonhuman animals is based on rational assessment of the i...

Common Sense

I like your columns, but they’re really all just common sense,” a client told me. He didn’t have a software background, and my columns were his first introduction to systematic ways of understanding software projects. To my chagrin, the net effect of a well-written column appeared to be that he thought software engineering was trivial! The idea that good software engineering “is all just common...