Once the data from a clinical trial are available for analysis it is common practice to carry out 'tests of baseline homogeneity' on prognostic covariates before proceeding to analyse the effects of treatment on outcome variables. It is argued that this practice is philosophically unsound, of no practical value and potentially misleading. Instead it is recommended that prognostic variables be i...

In a famous critique, Goodman dismissed similarity as a slippery and both philosophically and scientifically useless notion. We revisit his critique in the light of important recent work on similarity in psychology and cognitive science. Specifically, we use Tversky's influential set-theoretic account of similarity as well as Gärdenfors's more recent resuscitation of the geometrical account to ...

Let us take a very commonplace, often discussed and critical topic within our conversations regarding critical environmental issues: Are we detecting a Greenhouse Effect, and related to this, is it exacerbated by "homogenic factors," i.e., human actions? At this occasion I suspect that most would be inclined to give a positive answer to both of these questions. But, if pushed philosophically, w...

This paper presents a Model-Based graphical editor for supporting the creation of conceptual models and domain ontologies in a philosophically and cognitively well-founded modeling language named OntoUML. The Editor is designed in a way that, on one hand, it shields the user from the complexity of the ontological principles underlying this language. On the other hand, it reinforces these princi...

We present the most applicable aspects of our research in the conceptual integration of terminologies. From past experience, we claim that the conceptualizations provided for terminological ontologies need to be philosophically and linguistically grounded. We developed ONIONS, a methodology for integrating domain terminologies by exploiting a library of generic ontologies. Our current focus is ...

As a profession, we have standard practices for handling reasoning and argumentation. One feature of these practices is so familiar and pervasive that it is almost invisible: the medium of philosophical argumentation is prose. We spend a great deal of time articulating arguments in written prose, and identifying arguments in the writings of others. The dominance of prose goes beyond writing; ev...

AS A CLINICIAN it seems disrespectful to discuss the “meaning and value” of death. The preciousness of life underlies all clinical disciplines and preservation of life is a paramount clinical goal. Understandably, for clinicians death is the enemy to be conquered, and when it occurs, it represents defeat and failure. Phenomenologically, death is nonbeing. The essential nature of life entails ac...

Background Despite the risk of ‘method slurring’, researchers have triangulated within a single qualitative study methods that are philosophically incongruent or in a limited context, are congruent, as with hermeneutic phenomenology and constructivist grounded theory. Methods/ Materials We aimed to make the case that what works best can be to mix two qualitative methods that are philosophically...

The notion of existence is a very puzzling one philosophically. Often philosophers have appealed to linguistic properties of sentences stating existence. However, the appeal to linguistic intuitions has generally not been systematic and without serious regard of relevant issues in linguistic semantics. This paper has two aims. On the one hand, it will look at statements of existence from a syst...

On various probabilistic accounts of confirmation, including Bayesian confirmation theory, if a piece of evidence confirms a hypothesis, it also (usually) confirms the conjunction of that hypothesis and another, irrelevant hypothesis. Various writers have argued that this is no problem for the Bayesian approach, but they have ignored what I take to be by far the more serious (and more historica...