Humble Behaviorism or Equal Doses of Skepticism?

Pneumococcal conjugate vaccine: are 3 doses equal to 4 doses?

After the introduction of routine infant immunization with 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV-7), the United States has witnessed a 74% decline in the number of children ,5 years of age diagnosed with invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) and a 30% decline among all age groups. Likewise, rates of pneumoniaand otitis media-related medical visits among children, hospitalizations for pneum...

Skepticism, Sensitivity, and Closure, or Why the Closure Principle is Irrelevant to External World Skepticism

Is there a plausible argument for external world skepticism? Robert Nozick’s well–known discussion focuses upon arguments which utilize the Sensitivity Requirement and the Closure Principle. Nozick claims, correctly, that no such argument succeeds. But he gets almost all the details wrong. The Sensitivity Requirement and the Closure Principle are compatible; the Sensitivity Requirement is incor...

Midwives don't deliver or catch: a humble vocabulary suggestion.

Not All Skepticism Is Equal: Exploring the Ideological Antecedents of Science Acceptance and Rejection

Many topics that scientists investigate speak to people's ideological worldviews. We report three studies-including an analysis of large-scale survey data-in which we systematically investigate the ideological antecedents of general faith in science and willingness to support science, as well as of science skepticism of climate change, vaccination, and genetic modification (GM). The main predic...

Faith, Fact, and Behaviorism.

David Hume argued that ought cannot be derived from is. That is, no set of facts, no amount of scientific knowledge, is by itself sufficient to urge us to action. Yet generations of well-meaning scientists (more and more as secular influences grow in the West) seem to have forgotten Hume's words of wisdom. All motivated action depends ultimately on beliefs that cannot be proved by the methods o...