R. Jay Wallace There are two tendencies in our thinking about instrumental rationality that do not seem to cohere very well. On the one hand, the instrumental principle—enjoining us to take the means that are necessary relative to our ends—does not seem to apply indifferently to any end that we might be motivated to pursue. There is, for instance, no genuine requirement to take the means that a...

According to one view about the rationality of belief, such rationality is ultimately nothing other than the rationality that one exhibits in taking the means to one’s ends. On this view, epistemic rationality is really a species or special case of instrumental rationality. In particular, epistemic rationality is instrumental rationality in the service of one’s distinctively cognitive or episte...

There is increasing interest in the use of instrumental variable analysis to overcome unmeasured confounding in observational pharmacoepidemiological studies. This is partly because instrumental variable analyses are potentially less biased than conventional regression analyses. However, instrumental variable analyses are less precise, and regulators and clinicians find it difficult to interpre...

17th century measurements of the solar diameter indicate values which are about 10” (0.5 per cent) larger than the present figure of approximately 1920”. The apparent enlargement is smaller (3”) for measurements made during the 19th century. Has the diameter of the Sun diminished significantly over the past three centuries or is the reason for the difference located in the methods used or the i...

original article   mental fatigue (mf) is considered as a contributor factor in incident, even catastrophic one. electroencephalography measurement has been the most acceptable method to assess mf by neurologists. however, this method could be hardly feasible in real work setting. flicker fusion device, by contrast, is more usable at work setting. the purpose of this study was to compare the cr...

The instrumental variable method consistently estimates the effect of a treatment when there is unmeasured confounding and a valid instrumental variable. A valid instrumental variable is a variable that is independent of unmeasured confounders and affects the treatment but does not have a direct effect on the outcome beyond its effect on the treatment. Two commonly used estimators for using an ...