Essential Truths and Their Truth-Grounds

Models and the locus of their truth

If models can be true, where is their truth located? Giere (e.g. 1988) has suggested an account of theoretical models on which models themselves are not truth-valued. The paper suggests modifying Giere’s account without going all the way to purely pragmatic conceptions of truth – while giving pragmatics a prominent role in modeling and truth-acquisition. The strategy of the paper is to ask: if ...

Minke whales maximise energy storage on their feeding grounds.

Seasonal trends in energy storage of the minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), a capital breeder, were investigated in Iceland, a North Atlantic feeding ground. The aim was to better understand the energy acquisition strategies of minke whales and the energetic costs that different reproductive classes face during the breeding season. We modelled total blubber volume, using blubber thicknes...

Natural Principles and Fundamental Truths

REVIEW Microarray truths and consequences

For many, analysis of a microarray experiment starts with a spreadsheet of expression levels. While great attention is duly paid to RNA extraction, preparation and hybridization, relatively little care is devoted to extraction of expression levels from the fluorescent image. By delegating this step to a click of the mouse the exact extraction process is masked and researchers may be unwittingly...

Inaccessible truths and infinite coincidences

It is one of the salient features of an intuitionistic philosophy of mathematics that it denies the possibility that there may be infinite coincidences in mathematics: if a sentence is true, it can only be because there is a finitely expressible reason for it. The same view was expressed from a different standpoint by Hilbert in 1924 when he asserted that in mathematics there is ignorabimus. It...