There are no whole truths in meta-analyses: all their truths are half-truths

Some Truths Are Best Left Unsaid

We study the formal properties of extensions of the basic public announcement logic by standard modal axioms such as D, T, 2, 4, and 5. We show that some of them fail to be conservative extensions of the underlying modal logic. This leads us to propose new truth conditions for announcements that better suit these extensions. The corresponding reduction axioms postulate the suitability of the up...

How negative truths are made true

Aaron M. Griffith Identifying plausible truthmakers for negative truths has been a serious and perennial problem for truthmaker theory. I argue here that negative truths (in particular contingent negative existential truths) are indeed made true but not in the way that positive truths are. I rely on a distinction between “existence-independence” and “variation-independence” drawn by Hofmann and...

Are the Ugly Truths Not Ugly Enough?

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of papers, many of which have been published in high profile journals, that address real environmental or ecological problems, but with flawed, subjective, and frequently hyperbolic arguments. I identify two such examples from the US Gulf of Mexico, linked by their focus on fisheries resources as the cause de jour, to illustrate the probl...

Of hospital advertising truths, half truths, and the academic medical center.

Home truths from abroad.

I recently paid a visit to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. My aim was to exchange ideas about postgraduate training with the medical teachers there. Brown is one of America’s leading universities, and I saw a great deal that challenged my preconceptions about medicine in the USA, and also made me question some of our working practices in the UK. Most of my time was spent observing...