Cough's postulates

Diagnosing coughs and colds.

Rationality Postulates for Induction

I study the process of inductive hypothesis formation from two perspectives: finding general rules that explain given specific evidence, and finding general rules that are confirmed by the evidence. Both forms of hypothesis formation are axiomatised on the metalevel of consequence relations, which provides us with a set of rationality postulates for various forms of induction.

Coughs cause systemic blood flow.

Although it is known that rhythmic coughing can preserve consciousness during ventricular fibrillation, the arterial pressure transients which result have not yet been shown to reflect forward blood flow in man. The effectiveness of cough in causing forward flow in eight normal volunteers with bradycardia was studied. They coughed between cardiac cycles, using an audio and visual display of the...

Whither Koch’s Postulates?

S pecific etiology was one of the most powerful and productive ideas in the entire history of medicine. Replacing a shadowy intellectual landscape of humors and miasmata with the notion that particular diseases had particular causes, it marked the beginning of the end for both diagnostic imprecision and clinical impotence. Within the domain we now recognize as microbiology, the prime mover was,...

On Generalizing the AGM Postulates

The AGM theory is the dominating paradigm in the field of belief change but makes some non-elementary assumptions which disallow its application to certain logics. In this paper, we recast the theory by dropping most such assumptions; we determine necessary and sufficient conditions for a logic to support operators which are compatible with our generalized version of the theory and show that ou...