If only facts really were facts

Brute Facts, Social Facts, and Institutional Facts

Geographic regions (henceforth, regions for short) are spatially extended pieces of (near) earth surface that share some aspect of similarity across their extents. The most fundamental aspect of similarity shared within a region is "locational similarity"-proximity. But regions nearly always share common thematic content or activity too. That is, regions are defined not just spatially but accor...

Cheap Facts and Counter-Facts

This paper describes our experiments of using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to generate (counter-)facts from texts for certain namedentities. We give the human annotators a paragraph of text and a highlighted named-entity. They will write down several (counter-)facts about this named-entity in that context. The analysis of the results is performed by comparing the acquired data with the recognizing ...

Some assumptions and facts about arithmetic facts

In the present review we will deal with the following questions: What are arithmetic facts? How are they related to other cognitive functions? What are characteristic features of fact retrieval performance in healthy adult subjects? Which typical patterns of breakdown can be observed in acalculia? How do current models account for the representation of and access to arithmetic facts?

Population strategies for prevention? If only it were that simple!

Are causal facts really explanatorily emergent? Ladyman and Ross on higher-level causal facts and renormalization group explanation

In their Every Thing Must Go, Ladyman and Ross defend a novel version of NeoRussellian metaphysics of causation, which falls into three claims: (1) there are no fundamental physical causal facts (orthodox Russellian claim), (2) there are higher-level causal facts of the special sciences, and (3) higher-level causal facts are explanatorily emergent. While accepting claims (1) and (2), I attack c...