Millennium—Fantasy, Furor, and Fact

Canadian paper retreats after vaccine story sparks furor.

The publisher of Canada’s largest circulation daily, the Toronto Star, has acknowledged that the paper mishandled a story that suggested a link between the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil and serious illness and deaths. However, speaking on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio’s news program As It Happens on 11 February, the paper’s publisher, John Cruickshank, faulted the ...

Statin-use debate creates furor at The BMJ.

DLP and FaCT

DLP [Patel-Schneider(1998)] and FaCT [Horrocks(1998)] are two recent description logic systems that contain sound and complete reasoners for expressive description logics. Due to the equivalences between expressive description logics and propositional modal logics, both DLP and FaCT can be used as satisfiability checkers for propositional modal logics. FaCT is a full-featured system that contai...

“ Fact , Fable , and Darwin ”

I write as neither a creationist nor a Darwinist, but as one who knows what is probably the most disreputable scientific secret of the past century: There is no plausible scientific theory of the origin of species! Darwin himself was not sure he had produced one, and for many decades every competent evolutionary biologist has known that he did not. Although the experts have kept quiet when true...

Faith, Fact, and Behaviorism.

David Hume argued that ought cannot be derived from is. That is, no set of facts, no amount of scientific knowledge, is by itself sufficient to urge us to action. Yet generations of well-meaning scientists (more and more as secular influences grow in the West) seem to have forgotten Hume's words of wisdom. All motivated action depends ultimately on beliefs that cannot be proved by the methods o...