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.
Test your skills at formalising arguments by trying your hand at this quiz. Can you identify which sentences have which basic propositional forms?
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.
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 …
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
RCT is variously used to stand for one of two things: Randomised Controlled Trial Randomised Clinical Trial For the most part, when I’m talking about an RCT, it’s understood as a Randomised Clinical Trial, though I use them interchangeably because I can get away with it – but not everyone …
