Rational Acceptability and Truth

Rational action and truth-seeking

Rational Credence and the Value of Truth

Belief aims at truth—or so it is said, and there must be something right in the saying. Belief, though, can’t aim literally; it’s we who aim. We aim, moreover, in acting—when we shoot an arrow, say, or more broadly, whenever we act to try to bring something about. Believing isn’t an action; we can’t believe at will. In some extended, metaphorical sense, perhaps, belief does aim at truth. Unders...

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, 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...

truth and justification

within the linguistic paradigm, there is a problem that was always connected with coherence conceptions of truth: how we may, in light of the evidence available to us, raise an unconditional truth claim that aims beyond what is justified. in other words, within the linguistic paradigm, if the truth of a proposition can no longer be conceived as correspondence with something in the world, then h...