Viruses and Koch's Postulates

Identification of Unknown Turfgrass Pathogens: Kochs Postulates

History In 1876, a country doctor in Germany by the name of Robert Koch developed the first conclusive empirical evidence that a particular microbe causes a particular disease. Although he was working on anthrax, a deadly disease of warm-blooded animals (caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis), the procedures he laid out for determining the pathogenicity of a microorganism (in other words, ...

Behavior postulates and corollaries--1949.

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.

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...