Our knowledge of natural categories includes beliefs not only about what is true of them but also about what would be true if the categories had properties other than (or in addition to) their actual ones. Evidence about these beliefs comes from three lines of research: experiments on category-based induction, on hypothetical transformations of category members, and on definitions of kind terms...

The overwhelming majority of primary lung malignancies are secondary to smoke inhalation and occur in the older adult population in the presence of symptoms that are usually suspicious for an underlying malignancy. A chest radiograph is the initial imaging modality of choice to diagnose a lung cancer. However, a small percentage of lung cancer occurs despite a lack of smoking history whatsoever...

This paper investigates the relationship between Kant's analytics of biology, and the metaphysical conceptions of contingency and necessity in §§76–7 of the CPJ. In general, the connection between purposiveness and contingency is attested within the very project of a critique of a power of judgment. Indeed, the many particular, empirical laws of nature seem contingent regarding the universal la...

Necessity abounds. There are the necessary truths of logic, mathematics and metaphysics, the necessary connections among events in the natural world, the necessary or unconditional principles of ethics, and many other forms of necessary truth or connection. But how much diversity is there to this abundance? Are all necessary truths and connections reducible to a single common form of necessity?...

The hallowed path from language to universals has been by way of the correspondence theory of truth: the doctrine that whenever something is true, there must be something in the world which makes it true. I will call this the Truthmaker axiom. The desire to find an adequate truthmaker for every truth has been one of the sustaining forces behind traditional theories of u n i v e r s a l s . . . ...

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have grown to such a massive scale that performing an efficient search in the network is non-trivial. Systems such as Gnutella [1] were initially plagued with scalability problems as the number of users grew into the tens of thousands. As the number of users has now climbed into the millions, system designers have resorted to the use of supernodes to address scalabil...

Loosely structured heterogeneous information spaces are typically created by merging data from a variety of different applications and information sources. A common problem these information spaces need to address is that various data describe the same real-word entities (e.g., people, conferences, organizations). In this demo, we introduce necessity, an efficient and scalable entity store. nec...