Risk management, done well, should be inherently precautionary. Adopting an appropriate degree of precaution with respect to feared health and environmental hazards is fundamental to risk management. The real problem is in deciding how precautionary to be in the face of inevitable uncertainties, demanding that we understand the equally inevitable false positives and false negatives from screeni...

The conclusion of this argument (hereafter ZA) entails the falsity of physicalism because, technical details aside, physicalism is or entails the thesis that every psychological truth is entailed by some physical truth. If it is possible that I have a zombie duplicate however, then it is possible that the physical truths are as they are and some psychological truth is different. Hence 3 entails...

I wish to explore the link between interpretation ofmetaphors and generics in natural language, in support of a claim that the mechanisms and processes of interpretation for metaphors and generics are closely related through word sense modulation. Both tropes have curious truth conditions. In a strict literal sense (4.1), (4.2), (4.3), and (4.4) are false.

By writing scientific articles we communicate science among colleagues and peers. By doing this, it is our responsibility to adhere to some basic principles like transparency and accuracy. Authors, journal editors and reviewers need to be concerned about the quality of the work submitted for publication and ensure that only studies which have been designed, conducted and reported in a transpare...

An early three-volume technical work written with A. N. Whitehead sought to prove that the fields of mathematics could be derived from logic. The anecdote is told by G. H. Hardy 1 where Russell reported he dreamed that Principia Mathematica, his three-volume massive study, was being weeded out by a student assistant from library shelves two centuries hence. About the work.. .. In the chapter "T...

Two different paradoxes of the fuzzy logic programming system of [29] are presented. The first paradox is due to two distinct (contradictory) truth values for every ground atom of FLP, one is syntactical, the other is semantical. The second paradox concerns the cardinality of the valid FLP formulas which is found to have contradictory values: both $\aleph_0$ the cardinality of the natural numbe...

Granular computing, based on rough set theory [1, 2], provides the basis for a new computing paradigm [3, 4]. Applying granular computing to logical reasoning processes, we have proposed granular reasoning for connecting possible world semantics and granular computing [5], and developed a granular reasoning framework called a zooming reasoning system [6–8]. The key concept of zooming reasoning ...

starting points that lead to ‘the true’ but are not themselves genuine or authentic. For Heidegger, once we reflect on their inadequacies and recognize their function in everyday practice, they have no further role to play in philosophical reflection. Indeed, once we reach this point, reliance upon the everyday senses of truth becomes a barrier to reflection. We dispense with truth as correctne...

Microsatellite loci are widely used in population genetic studies, but the presence of null alleles may lead to biased results. Here, we assessed five methods that indirectly detect null alleles and found large inconsistencies among them. Our analysis was based on 20 microsatellite loci genotyped in a natural population of Microtus oeconomus sampled during 8 years, together with 1200 simulated ...