Saying More with Less

Saying More (or Less) than One Thing

In a paper called Definiteness and Knowability, Timothy Williamson investigates the question of whether one must accept that vagueness is an epistemic phenomenon if one adopts classical logic and a disquotational principle for truth. Some have thought that one must not, and have argued that classical logic and the disquotational principle can be preserved without accepting that vagueness is an ...

Saying Less and Meaning Less Figure 2: the Attenuation Frame

Understatement might not seem like a big deal, but it is a force to be reckoned with. The phenomenon is paradoxical on the face of it: minus dicimus, plus significamus, say less and mean more. An understatement is a statement which, somehow, because it is conspicuously less informative than some other statement, can be used to express the meaning of the more informative statement. It is not a p...

More with less Xist.

S ince the birth of Dolly, the first mammal produced from somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), little progress has been made in the efficiency of cloning. Overall, about 0.5–2% of the embryos reconstructed by SCNT develop to term after transfer of reconstructed embryos to recipient females. In PNAS, Matoba et al. (1) report significant improvement in cloning efficiency by manipulation of the l...

More with Less:

Learning More, with Less

P racticing chemists solve problems via “chemical intuition”, a quality that lets them skip intermediate details and get to the essential result, even if the outcome is counterintuitive to the uninitiated. There is no human shortcut to building this intuition; chemists hone their skills through years of experience of learning and memorizing patterns of molecular structure and reactivity. It is ...