A classic argument for skepticism about the external world runs as follows. First: we cannot know that the evil-demon hypothesis is false, where the evil-demon hypothesis says that all of our sensory experiences have been produced by an evil demon. Second: if we cannot know that the evil-demon hypothesis is false, we cannot know we have hands. Conclusion: We cannot know we have hands. Generaliz...

The high degree of autonomy that is being built into today’s control systems, coupled with their vulnerability to attack at the computer network level, mandates a recasting of the man-machine social contract. We now have the technology and the capability to enable these control systems to entertain “a healthy skepticism” about the validity of the commands being given then and the identity of th...

CLINICAL CHEMISTRY, the science in whieh chemical and biologic analysis of body fluids and tissues is used in the diagnosis and treatment of disease, is undergoing rapid change. Engineers and physicists have entered the field and have designed automated and mechanized equipment which, some people postulate, eventually may replace not only the technician, but also the clinical chemist. I feel, h...

E R R Y E LL IS M in d en P ic tu re s conflict—they deserve full scrutiny. With that in mind, the book The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press), by Bjørn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, should be a welcome audit. And yet it isn’t. As the book’s subtitle—Measuring the Real State of the World—indicates, Lomborg’s intentio...

changed shape numerous times, thus making it difficult to combat a general skeptical problem. Contemporarily, the dilemma is structured in the form of the skeptical hypothesis (SH), and it is this formulation that is the focus of this paper. The core element of the skeptical hypothesis is the possibility of a delusion (D) that is irreconcilable with some ordinary empirical proposition (O) that ...

A Refutation of Skeptical Theism David Kyle Johnson The evidential problem of evil suggests that our awareness of the existence of seemingly unjustified evils reduces the epistemic probability of God’s existence. Arguments to this effect have been most famously and successfully championed by William Rowe. 1 His defense of the argument has developed over the years, but the basics of the argument...

Auditors review documented financial figures to test for their accuracy and materiality. Lawyers analyze evidential facts and records to build sound legal arguments. These parties work toward a mutual purpose: to present their clients as legitimate and compliant businesses. But what happens when the concrete facts upon which lawyers and auditors base their work are obscured by their inability t...

Deterrence of illegal activities is frequently carried out by many atomistic auditors (tax auditors, law enforcement agents, etc.). Not much is known either normatively about the best way to incentivize the auditors, nor positively about what these incentives look like in real world organizations. This paper focuses on the positive question. It proposes a game-theoretic model of decentralized d...

The turbulent events of the global financial crises have highlighted the importance of audit quality. Auditing in today’s business environment involves navigating through organizational information technology (IT) landscape dominated by ERP systems. Organizations depend on ERP systems for financial reporting which involve dealing with statutory and regulatory provisions. ERP systems thus, have ...