Competing Presumptions About Statutory Coherence

Myths, presumptions, and facts about obesity.

BACKGROUND Many beliefs about obesity persist in the absence of supporting scientific evidence (presumptions); some persist despite contradicting evidence (myths). The promulgation of unsupported beliefs may yield poorly informed policy decisions, inaccurate clinical and public health recommendations, and an unproductive allocation of research resources and may divert attention away from useful...

Competing accounts of contrastive coherence

The proposition that Tweety is a bird coheres better with the proposition that Tweety has wings than with the proposition that Tweety cannot fly. This relationship of contrastive coherence is the focus of the present paper. Based on recent work in formal epistemology we consider various possibilities to model this relationship by means of probability theory. In a second step we consider differe...

About the Coherence of Biophotons

Biophoton emission is a general phenomenon of living systems. It concerns low luminescence from a few up to some hundred photons-per-second per square-centimeter surface area. At least within the spectral region from 200 to 800nm. The experimental results indicate that biophotons originate from a coherent (or/and squeezed) photon field within the living organism, its function being intraand int...

Implicatures and hierarchies of presumptions

Implicatures are described as particular forms reasoning from best explanation, in which the paradigm of possible explanations consists of the possible semantic interpretations of a sentence or a word. The need for explanation will be shown to be triggered by conflicts between presumptions, namely hearer’s dialogical expectations and the presumptive sentence meaning. What counts as the best exp...

Unsafe presumptions in clinical research.