Canonical Truth

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth

This discussion aims to provide the occasional medical expert witness with background knowledge of the adversarial court system and the role of the medical expert witness within it. The parallel evolution of the adversarial and inquisitorial legal systems has been more out of tradition rather than any systematic review of the effectiveness of one system or the other. Both legal systems have the...

Truth about Truth Detecting Techniques

During the period from 2001 to 2010 police officials in India were lured by a team of pseudo-scientists, from the Forensic Laboratories in Bangalore and Ahmadabad to make use of narcoanalysis, polygraph test and brain fingerprinting to extract confessions from accused persons. All the three tests, preceded by a pre-test interview and interrogation, were conducted by the one and the same expert ...

Truth-Making without Truth-Makers

The article is primarily concerned with the notion of a truth-maker. An explication for this notion is offered, which relates it to other notions of making something such-andsuch. In particular, it is shown that the notion of a truth-maker is a close relative of a concept employed by van Inwagen in the formulation of his Consequence Argument. This circumstance helps understanding the general me...

Truth-bearers or Truth-makers?

Truth, double truth and statistics.

After every influenza pandemic (including the Russian of the 1890s and the Spanish influenza of 1918–1919), learned commentaries have reflected on the clinical presentation of the disease, noting that the great majority of cases were very mild, so mild that they corresponded much more to the symptoms of an upper respiratory tract infection than to an influenza-like illness with fever and prostr...