Online research in philosophy

An astonishing volume and diversity of evidence is available for many hypotheses in the biomedical and social sciences. Some of this evidence—usually from randomized controlled trials (RCTs)—is amalgamated by meta-analysis. Despite the ongoing debate regarding whether or not RCTs are the ‘gold-standard’ of evidence, it is usually meta-analysis which is considered the best source of evidence: meta-analysis is thought by many to be the platinum standard of evidence. However, I argue that meta-analysis falls far short of that standard. Different meta-analyses of the same evidence can reach contradictory conclusions. Meta-analysis fails to provide objective grounds for intersubjective assessments of hypotheses because numerous decisions must be made when performing a meta-analysis which allow wide latitude for subjective idiosyncrasies to influence its outcome. I end by suggesting that an older tradition of evidence in medicine—the plurality of reasoning strategies appealed to by the epidemiologist Sir Bradford Hill—is a superior strategy for assessing a large volume and diversity of evidence.

Recent philosophical and psychological researches show that memory, not only stores information but also process it. It's possible one to have a meta-representational memory despite the propositional content and attitude of the present meta-representation being different from the propositional content and attitude of the thought that the meta-representation is causally derived. So, the question is: if we take for granted that this kind of memory doesn't require content or attitude identity, what is the permissible range of aberration between the original content and the memory content? This paper proposes some conditions to define when a present meta-representation has the status of memory of a past thought, despite the difference of content or attitude. The condition for diachronic content similarity is the same proposed by Sven Bernerker. The attitude condition is a new one: the attitude that S thinks (at t2) himself having taken (at t1) towards p and the attitude that S took at t1 towards p* are sufficiently similar if and only if they are the same or the attitude of the present thought is entailed by the past attitude.