A CASE NOT WHOLLY HYPOTHETICAL

Wholly Hypothetical Syllogisms

In antiquity we encounter a distinction of two types of hypothetical syllogisms. One type are the 'mixed hypothetical syllogisms'. The other type is the one to which the present paper is devoted. These arguments went by the name of 'wholly hypothetical syllogisms'. They were thought to make up a self-contained system of valid arguments. Their paradigm case consists of two conditionals as premis...

Controls who experienced hypothetical causal intermediates should not be excluded from case-control studies.

It has been suggested that controls with adenomatous polyps of the colon and rectum should be excluded from case-control studies of cigarette smoking and colorectal cancer. A claim has been made that the presence of such controls creates a bias toward the null. The polyps are an intermediate step in a hypothetical causal pathway between the exposure and the disease. Thus, the recommendation log...

A wholly empirical explanation of perceived motion.

Because the retinal activity generated by a moving object cannot specify which of an infinite number of possible physical displacements underlies the stimulus, its real-world cause is necessarily uncertain. How, then, do observers respond successfully to sequences of images whose provenance is ambiguous? Here we explore the hypothesis that the visual system solves this problem by a probabilisti...

Operational Analysis Based on Minimal Information: A Hypothetical Case Study

Preferred analysis methods for Affymetrix GeneChips revealed by a wholly

Background: As more methods are developed to analyze RNA-profiling data, assessing their performance using control datasets becomes increasingly important. Results: We present a 'spike-in' experiment for Affymetrix GeneChips that provides a defined dataset of 3,860 RNA species, which we use to evaluate analysis options for identifying differentially expressed genes. The experimental design inco...