Trials can be described as being on a design spectrum between highly explanatory (roughly, ‘Can the intervention work?’) to highly pragmatic (‘Does the intervention work in routine care?’). A criticism levelled at trials that take a pragmatic approach is that they sacrifice internal validity for external validity, i.e. there is a trade-off to be made. Proponents of pragmatic trials argue that t...

The desideratum for the concept of a semiotic web is proposed. It combines both the recent semantic web and the pragmatic web initiatives but surpasses them in being faithful to Charles S. Peirce’s pragmatic approach to inquiry. I will address some conceptual shortcomings of the semantic and pragmatic web proposals, and suggest that in a semiotic web, one can to operationalise its basic ideas i...

We will argue that this construction combines semantic and syntactic quirks that necessitate a constructional analysis. Further, we will show that specifying the pragmatic properties of the construction (and in particular the presuppositions that introduces) allows for a particularly elegant account of the construction’s distribution. This, in turn, provides further support for the sign-based v...

Entropy can be defined as the antithesis of well-formed true reports that agree with each other and with the material facts accessible through the experience of one or more competent observers. The abstract convergence (strictly formal, logical agreement) of true narrative representations (TNRs)—ordinary valid reports of facts of experience—makes them formally more complete than fictions, error...

This paper propo~s a reversible architecture to handle not orily syntactic and semantic information but also pragmatic information. • I Existing architectures cannot represent pragmatic informatioil explicitly, and lack reasoning capability;given insufficient information. I argue that the techniques of plan representation and approximate reasoning are, in the enhanced argumentation system propo...

We present a pragmatic approach to using large-scale ontologies as contexts. The approach is based on a light-weight ontology model and grounding of the ontology concepts in textual documents. These assumptions allow for efficient implementation of the basic operations (classification, population and mappings between ontologies), and, as a consequence, exploitation of several large-scale ontolo...

UNLABELLED This continuing education paper outlines the skills and knowledge required to plan, implement and evaluate a pragmatic approach to intra-dialytic exercise training. AIM The aim of this continuing education article is to enable the nephrology multi-disciplinary team (MDT) to plan, implement and evaluate the provision of intra-dialytic exercise training for patients receiving haemodi...

Despite the peer-to-peer community’s obvious wish to have its systems adopted, specific mechanisms to facilitate incremental adoption have not yet received the same level of attention as the many other practical concerns associated with these systems. This paper argues that ease of adoption should be elevated to a first-class concern and accordingly presents HOLD, a front-end to existing DHTs t...

Epistemic modals or predicates in English and Japanese are analyzed from three viewpoints: (i) reality of p (=propositional content), (ii) time of p, and (iii) causality of p, and three conditions are proposed: the Reality Condition, the Actuality Condition, and the Present Condition, which are in a hierarchical order. It is argued that when the epistemic modal expresses a cause inference, the ...