Fallacies Quiz (WritePhilosophy Quiz)
Can you tell your ad hominem from your Eminem? Pick out a straw man from amongst the scarecrows? We created this quiz to test your understanding of the argumentative fallacies from the Fallacies guide.
Paradoxes Quiz (Write Philosophy Quiz)
Do you know your liar paradox from your Ship of Theseus? Can you tell a Catch 22 from an Unexpected Hanging? This WritePhilosophy.com quiz will test your paradox identification skills.
Logical Validity (WritePhilosophy Quiz)
Can you tell a valid argument from an invalid one? This quiz will allow you to practice identifying valid arguments. If you struggle with the quiz, go back and check out the ‘Validity and Soundness’ guide article.
Logic: Basic Propositions (WritePhilosophy Quiz)
Test your skills at formalising arguments by trying your hand at this quiz. Can you identify which sentences have which basic propositional forms?
Logic: Compound Propositions (WritePhilosophy Quiz)
This quiz will test your ability to formalise more complex sentences into propositional form. You should try this after you’re confident in formalising basic propositions.
An Honest Mess
Evidence-Based Medicine is an attempt to simplify and streamline a complex reality into a more manageable structure. Reflective EBM proponents know that matters are very complicated. But they understand that practitioners have very limited time (and abilities) to deal with these complexities. They must use heuristics and simplifications. Sometimes this …
Festive Fallacies: When the snowman brings the snow
When the nights are long and the days short, there is some solace in the familiarity of classic Christmas songs. But stuffed with pigs-in-blankets and addled on mulled wine, festive pop lyricists seem particularly prone to fallacy. What better way, then, to teach errors in reasoning than to dissect these Xmas classics? Humbug!
Strength of Recommendation – the Rudner Problem
Strength of Recommendation hierarchies such as SORT and GRADE go a step further than your standard hierarchy of evidence. Standard hierarchies tend to rank or rate the evidence provided by a study on a scale of quality, strength or validity. Strength of Recommendation hierarchies are usually two-step processes. First, they …
Ps in a POD – definitions in circles
In my paper “The Disunity of Evidence-Based Medicine“, I lay out four distinct definitional strategies employed by proponents of Evidence-Based Medicine, each conveniently beginning with P: Platitude, Paradigm, Principles and Process. I made a bad pun about “Ps in a Pod” in a section title, which actually originates with some …
The Disunity of Evidence-Based Medicine
Critics and advocates alike have expended much effort defining Evidence-Based Medicine. However, there has been little consensus about what “Evidence-Based Medicine” is. Some authors see ‘EBM’ as something one believes—a view about medicine. Others interpret EBM as something one does—a particular way of practicing medicine. Still others seem to view …