Either you know or you've gotta believe

You gotta believe

I argue that proper assertion requires belief. Jennifer Lackey has recently argued otherwise. Here I respond to Lackey’s argument and provide positive evidence that permissible assertion does require belief. The positive evidence takes the form of an explanatory argument from linguistic patterns surrounding the give and take of assertion. Looming large in the background of the discussion is whe...

You gotta know when to hold 'em...

Putting together a winning team is certainly not a game. It requires skill, diligence, and a little bit of luck. The poker analogy is simply a tool to present critical information in a fun, relevant format. However, with a proactive, pragmatic, and creative approach to hiring, you will improve your odds of successfully hiring the perfect match for your practice. Good luck!

The “either You Know Which Is Better or You Don’t” Strategy

N apparent ethical dilemma arises when physicians consider enrolling their patients in randomized clinical trials. Suppose that a randomized clinical trial comparing two treatments is in progress, and a physician has an opinion about which treatment is better. The physician has a duty to promote the patient’s best medical interests and therefore seems to be obliged to advise the patient to rece...

Knowing What to Believe (when you already know something)

Although much work in NLP has focused on simply determining what a document means, we also must know whether or not to believe it. Fact-finding algorithms attempt to identify the “truth” among competing claims in a corpus, but fail to take advantage of the user’s prior knowledge and presume that truth itself is universal and objective rather than subjective. We introduce a framework for incorpo...

Iron chelation therapy: you gotta have heart.