Asbestos: Facts and Fiction I appreciate the opportunity to address the omissions, inaccuracies, and innuendos in the position paper by David P. Rall, "Media and Science: Harmless Dioxin, Benign CFCs, and Good Asbestos" (EHP 102:10). Unfortunately, Rail not only misinterprets the conclusions of our 1990 Science article by Mossman et al. (1) but he fails to mention the database, scientific panel...

Uncertainty creates anxiety so attempts have been made to reduce it using mathematical techniques. In the electronics industry the very large quantities of devices processed have provided reliable statistics and the opportunity to employ statistical methods. However, in fields such as decision-making and risk assessment there are strong criticisms of the probability calculus that have been trig...

Most scientific models are not physical objects, and this raises important questions. What sort of entity are models, what is truth in a model, and how do we learn about models? In this paper I argue that models share important aspects in common with literary fiction, and that therefore theories of fiction can be brought to bear on these questions. In particular, I argue that the pretence theor...

Mark Balaguer's project in this book is extremely ambitious; he sets out to defend both platonism and fictionalism about mathematical entities. Moreover, Balaguer argues that at the end of the day, platonism and fictionalism are on an equal footing. Not content to leave the matter there, however, he advances the anti-metaphysical conclusion that there is no fact of the matter about the existenc...