BACKGROUND The neurological outcome of decompressive surgery for cervical myelopathy is influenced by several factors. Although each factor may have an independent effect, it is more likely that the outcome is influenced by more than one factor. We examined the results of multivariate analysis and multiple regression analysis of the neurological outcome of patients treated by cervical cord deco...

Recent decades have seen a surge in interest in metaphilosophy. In particular there has been an interest in philosophical methodology. Various questions have been asked about philosophical methods. Are our methods any good? Can we improve upon them? However, prior to such evaluative and ameliorative concerns, is the matter of what methods philosophers actually use. Worryingly, our understanding...

Overcoming the Intuition Wall

This paper presents the construction details of five demonstrations intended to provide an eyes on and hands on intuitive link to the concepts of the electromagnetic force, superposition, and geometric implications of Maxwell’s equations. The vector calculus operators of Maxwell’s equations are described in terms of common concepts of atmospheric pressure and bolt action. Intuitive links betwee...

A traditional source of evidence in linguistics is intuition, the judgments of competent speakers of a language. Patterns in the intuitions motivate theoretical developments, and hypotheses are tested against those intuitions. In much of the literature on intuitions in linguistics, 'intuition' is used synonymously with 'grammaticality judgment,' which in turn is a (widely-recognized) misnomer f...

Long after Pyrrho, epistemology wrestles with scepticism about our knowledge of the external world. We know about the external world through perception. But that knowledge is hard to understand. Because perception seems to be our only means to assess its own reliability, we appear to be caught in a kind of epistemic circle: how can we rationally trust a faculty whose trustworthiness can be know...