IntroductionBisphenol A is highly debated and studied in relation to a variety of health outcomes. This large variation in the literature makes BPA a topic that is prone to selective use of literature, in order to underpin one’s own findings and opinion. Over time, selective use of literature, by means of citations, can lead to a skewed knowledge development and a biased scientific consensus. In this study, we assess which factors drive citation and whether this results in the overrepresentation of (...) harmful health effects of BPA.MethodsA citation network analysis was performed to test various determinants of citation. A systematic search identified all relevant publications on the human health effect of BPA. Data were extracted on potential determinants of selective citation, such as study outcome, study design, sample size, journal impact factor, authority of the author, self-citation, and funding source. We applied random effect logistic regression to assess whether these determinants influence the likelihood of citation.ResultsOne hundred sixty-nine publications on BPA were identified, with 12,432 potential citation pathways of which 808 citations occurred. The network consisted of 63 cross-sectional studies, 34 cohort studies, 29 case-control studies, 35 narrative reviews, and 8 systematic reviews. Positive studies have a 1.5 times greater chance of being cited compared to negative studies. Additionally, the authority of the author and self-citation are consistently found to be positively associated with the likelihood of being cited. Overall, the network seems to be highly influenced by two highly cited publications, whereas 60 out of 169 publications received no citations.ConclusionIn the literature on BPA, citation is mostly driven by positive study outcome and author-related factors, such as high authority within the network. Interpreting the impact of these factors and the big influence of a few highly cited publications, it can be questioned to which extent the knowledge development in human literature on BPA is actually evidence-based. (shrink)

This is the collection of essays presented to Bochenski on his 60th birthday, and it contains, as a mirror of Bochenski's own work, a broad spectrum of studies ranging from formal logic and history of logic, to the philosophy of logic and language, and to the methodology of explanation in Greek philosophy. Of the seventeen articles, these are some of the more important to the reviewer: "Betrachtungen zum Sequenzen Kalkül" by Paul Bernays, which is an extensive study of Gentzen-type formulations (...) of logic; "Remarks on Formal Deduction," H. B. Curry, a further discussion of sequenzen-logics; "Marginalia on Gentzen's Sequenzen Kalkül" by Hughes Leblanc; "Method and Logic in Presocratic Explanation," Jerry Stannard; "On the Logic of Preference and Choice," H. S. Houthakker, a suggestive presentation of decision and utility theory in logical form; "Leibniz's Law in Belief Contexts," Chisholm; "On Ontology and the Province of Logic," R. M. Martin; and "N. A. Vasilev and the Development of Many-valued Logics," G. L. Kline, an important addition to the history of logic. Other contributors are: Storrs McCall, Albert Menne, E. W. Beth, Benson Mates, Ivo Thomas, J. F. Staal, F. R. Barbò, A.-T. Tymieniecka, and N. M. Luyten. There is a bibliography of Bochenski's writings through 1962.—P. J. M. (shrink)

pausanias Preserves what we know about the Little and the Great Daidala, religious celebrations which took place in Plataia from the classical into the Roman period . To his account can be added a fragment from Plutarch's work , and a brief mention in Menander Rhetor . At the celebration of the Little Daidala, which occurred about every six years or so , the Plataians made an image from the trunk of an oak tree ; they called the image a (...) daidalon, because ‘the men of old’ called the wooden images, the xoana, daidala . Every sixty years, the Plataians celebrated the Great Daidala, to which other Boiotian states sent representations . At this Great Daidala, all the images which had been made at the Little Daidala were gathered together and burnt . The process by which this was done was to allocate by lot to each of the important Boiotian towns one of the daidala, and to distribute the rest amongst the lesser Boiotian states, who would pool their resources so as to be able to participate in the ceremony . Each large city, or a group of smaller cities, was thus responsible for one daidalon. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to relate the operative and constructive formulation of symbolic logic carried out by Lorenzen—and to a lesser degree Kolmogorov and Markov—to both Wittgenstein's philosophy of logic as set forth in the Tractatus and later modified in the Investigations, and to Brouwer's critique of classical logic, especially the principles of excluded middle. The first chapter contains an exposition of Wittgenstein's critical analysis of the "mythical" views of Russell and Frege; and it develops his own "operative" theory (...) of elementary logic. The second chapter concerns the relations of the theories of Brouwer and Wittgenstein; the last section is a detailed survey of chiefly Lorenzen's operative logic in which the presentation of a dialogue-like interpretation of logic is exhaustively analyzed: the notion of a "winning strategy" in such a two-person dialogue is set forth, the technique is extended to classical logic from its original, weaker operational form, and its relations to Gentzen's Sequenzen-kalkül is discussed. The work was the author's Habilitationsschrift at Innsbruck University.—P. J. M. (shrink)

Descartes considered the methods of reasoning put forth in the Discourse to be correct because, among other justifications, he had examples of scientific theories in which the techniques were successful: the Optics, Meteorology, and Geometry. The chief value of this edition is to have the Discourse back in its proper setting, as well as the more obvious one of having available three works of importance in the history of the exact sciences in one compact and readable edition. The Optics is (...) especially useful for the study of Descartes' theory of sight and perception. There are a large number of diagrams and figures which are quite helpful in making some rather schematic presentations more complete.—P. J. M. (shrink)

This monograph is the first really systematic study of the model theory of many-valued logic. The authors develop model theory for systems of logic whose truth-values lie in a compact topological space; the results are analogous to those for two-valued logic—they yield the two valued logics as special cases—but often the methods of proof are more complicated and tend to reveal some of the deep structure of these logics. There is presupposed a fair knowledge of naive set theory and point-set (...) topology, but no knowledge of classical logic is required although it will be of help in seeing the motivation behind various results. The first three chapters are concerned with preliminaries on topology, model theory, and continuous logic. The next chapter examines the relation of elementary equivalence among models, including the downward Skolem-Löwenheim theorem; the fifth chapter contains the generalizations of such classical results as the compactness and upward S-L theorems. The authors specialize their work in the sixth chapter to consider certain particular kinds of models: saturated models, universal models. The last chapter considers classes of models closed under various algebraic operations. There is a bibliography, historical notes, and indices of exercises, symbols, and definitions. This book is the prolegomenon to any future study of many-valued logic.—P. J. M. (shrink)

This is easily the most systematic survey of the foundations of logic and mathematics available today. Although Beth does not cover the development of set theory in great detail, all other aspects of logic are well represented. There are nine chapters which cover, though not in this order, the following: historical background and introduction to the philosophy of mathematics; the existence of mathematical objects as expressed by Logicism, Cantorism, Intuitionism, and Nominalism; informal elementary axiomatics; formalized axiomatics with reference to finitary (...) theory of proof; non-elementary metamathematics, embracing formal syntax and semantics; applications of set theory and topology in metamathematics—especially in the theory of models; recursive function theory; the logical paradoxes; the relation of philosophy of mathematics to general philosophy. This is a mere skeleton of the whole, but it indicates the broad sweep of the work. One unifying feature is the author's use of his "semantic tableau" method of examining the truth or falsity of sentences. Although the author is an Intuitionist, classical metamathematical proof techniques are by no means slighted; they are used throughout much of the book, and are indispensable, of course, when dealing with classical logic. Exercises are scattered throughout and at the end; few of them are trivial. There is a very extensive bibliography, brought up to date from the first edition. This extraordinary book will be of use to logicians as a reference tool and to philosophers trying to survey the field of modern formal logic; its appearance in a fine paper edition is therefore doubly welcome—P. J. M. (shrink)

For this volume Professor Davis has assembled a number of the most important papers on undecidable propositions, unsolvable problems and computable functions. Several papers appear here in print for the first time: Gödel's remarks at the Princeton Bicentennial Conference on Problems in Mathematics, and Post's paper on Absolutely Unsolvable Problems. Other authors whose work is included are Church, Turing, Rosser, and Kleene. Gödel's classic "On Formally Undecidable Propositions..." appears in a new translation, and all papers have been corrected, many such (...) corrections provided by the original authors. The editor has contributed brief notes preceding each paper, these notes are intended to clarify and otherwise expatiate upon the contents of those articles. A valuable collection both for original source material as well as historical formulations of current problems.—P. J. M. (shrink)

This is a textbook in symbolic logic comprising sentential and quantificational theory only. The logic of the propositional calculus is developed in a natural-deduction form reminiscent of Fitch's technique; therefore, most of the theorems take the form of metamathematical assertions and possess corresponding meta-proofs. The classical propositional calculus SCc is then formulated in the Hilbert-style axiomatic way which naturally leads to consistency, completeness, and decidability theorems for the system. The theory of quantifiers is also first set up in natural deduction (...) form, and then reformulated classically. Leblanc spends considerable time in a careful treatment of satisfiability and validity in first-order logic, this leading naturally to the Löweheim-Skolem [[sic]] theorem and related completeness results. There is an appendix containing some relevant results from set theory. In general this is a most thorough and neat job which succeeds admirably in giving in semantical form a rigorous introduction to logic.—P. J. M. (shrink)

This interesting collection is the Festschrift presented to W. Britzelmayr on his seventieth birthday, and it contains several excellent papers which ought to interest the logician and philosophical analyst alike. The most exciting paper is one by Stegmüller in which a system of set theory combining ideas from Bernays and Quine is formulated; one by Kurt Schütte discusses the limitations imposed by constructive logic on the theory of trans finite arithmetic; there are papers by each of the editors: the first (...) analyzes the deduction theorem for the first order predicate calculus, while the second treats logics with predicate quantifiers. Other papers include studies by Behmann on the philosophico-logical status of identity; by Beth on the application of his semantic tableaux to classical logic; by Wilhelmy on the semantics of quantified, many-valued logics; and by E. M. Fels concerning the work of Markov and his school in the theory of canonical systems. There are still further papers which take as their topics the logical analysis of legal concepts and reasoning, the logic of questions, the semantics of implication in ordinary language, and the relation of the theory of logical types to Frege's work. In general, this is an excellent collection which affords a wide view of the logico-linguistic concerns of recent German philosophy.—P. J. M. (shrink)

Dopp is one of the very few logicians writing in French today, and so there are few textbooks of logic in that language. This is the newest one, and it is concerned essentially with the propositional and first-order predicate calculi, from both their historical as well as contemporary aspects. After examining the concepts of classical logic, Dopp presents the propositional calculus as a calculus of truth-functions and then gives it an axiomatic underpinning. In the treatment of quantification, first traditional logic (...) is presented, and then modern first-order logic with identity is examined in some detail, with attention to the technique of semantic tableaux. An appendix provides a number of alternative systems of the propositional calculus in axiomatic form.—P. J. M. (shrink)

In this monograph the author presents the special and general theories of relativity from a geochronometrical viewpoint. The amount of mathematics demanded is not too great, and one can get quite far along on the material on vectors presented early in the book. The first three chapters especially derive from the work of A. A. Robb several decades ago: they treat foundations of geochronometry, one-plus-one geochronometry and its generalization to a one-plus-three system. Later chapters cover such staples as the Lorentz (...) transformation, the metric and dynamical tensors, dynamical relationships of particles, accelerating and curving events, geodesics, and applications to the red-shift of spectral lines and bending of light-rays. The best introduction to the study of the foundation of physics is physics itself; so those philosophers interested in the foundations of relativity theory will find here a lucid and logically respectable exposition of that theory, and in that way an understanding of its fundamentals and problems will be reached.—P. J. M. (shrink)

As inductive logic and the philosophy of probability theory have become of wider interest, it has become clear that a book of readings in these and related topics would be useful for courses since most of the important articles are scattered and inaccessible. The editors have fashioned an extensive collection of papers in four main areas: the meaning of probability, confirmation theory, simplicity of theories and structures, the justification of induction. Each chapter is preceded by an introduction which sets out (...) the basic problems of the topic under consideration. There are thirty-six papers in all, two-thirds of them in the first and last chapters. The first chapter includes articles by Ramsey, Carnap, Nagel, and Reichenbach. The second chapter is dominated by the work of Hempel, Oppenheim, and Kemeny; the third chapter features a long article by D. J. Hillman which takes as its basis the work of Goodman, and there are other papers by Bunge, Quine, and Barker. The discussion of induction and its justification contains articles by Hume and Mill, but the bulk of the papers are contemporary. There is a bibliography for each chapter at the end of the book.—P. J. M. (shrink)

The author is interested in discussing various aspects of the propositional calculus; in particular, the relationships among the various propositional connectives in various systems of logic such as Intuitionistic and modal are scrutinized. The first three chapters survey the notation to be used and describe the general notion of logistic system; the author then describes the concept of a deductive system in exceptional generality, then treats the connexions of equivalence and independence among such deductive systems in what are essentially algebraic (...) terms. Building on the latter work, he then treats the idea of one system's being an extension of the other, going into the details concerning the fine structure of exactly what sort of extension it is—conservative, consistent, and thus arrives at Lindenbaum's lemma. The equivalence relations of congruence and equipollence among propositional systems form the central core around which Porte's discussion of axiomatizability of systems of connectives constituting various propositional calculi is based. Porte is one of the best of the several young logicians now working in France and this book is useful both as a technical treatise containing a sophisticated treatment of sentential logic, and as a guide to at least one direction and trend of contemporary French logical thought.—P. J. M. (shrink)