Many people are saying nowadays that what you know partly depends on what practical decisions you face (e.g. Stanley 2005; Fantl and McGrath 2009). This “pragmatic encroachment” thesis usually involves two different ideas. One idea is that knowledge plays a distinctive role in practical reasoning: you can act on what you know. The other idea is that knowledge is harder to achieve when more is a...

A substantial minority of patients with terminal illness hold unrealistically hopeful beliefs about the severity of their disease or the nature of its treatment, considering therapy as curative rather than palliative. We propose that this attitude may be understood as self-deception, following the current psychological theories about this topic. In this article we suggest that the reason these ...

The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used a fake vaccination programme to obtain DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) samples in the search for Osama Bin Laden, which caused distrust and hampered polio eradication and other public health efforts in Pakistan.1,2 The Obama administration’s vow that the CIA will never again exploit a vaccination programme in its counterterrorism efforts ther...

the purpose of this study was to detect differentially functioning items in the university of tehran english proficiency test (utept) which is a high stake test of english developed and administered by the language testing centre of the university of tehran. this paper is based on the answers of 400 test takers to the test. all participants earned a master degree either in humanities or science...