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Narrative fallacy is a problematic heuristic that leads us to make inaccurate cause-effect relationships. They are a particular issue in case reports because of the limited scope of these papers, the perpetuated biases they proffer and the misperception of 'black swan' events. This article highlights the negative effects of these fallacies in dermatological practice through three case studies: the use of epinephrine with lignocaine at distal sites, the difference between once-daily and twice-daily application of topical steroids, and the effect of sterile gloves for skin surgery on infection rates. Awareness of the biases in case reports and the employment of metacognition may help us to avoid falling victim to narrative fallacies. Given the potential problems with this heuristic, Clinical and Experimental Dermatology (CED) utilizes case reports to further medical education and offer different clinical perspectives, rather than as a driver of medical knowledge.

The Court of Appeal for Bermuda (Clarke P, Smellie JA and Subair Williams JA) recently handed down judgment in Grand View Private Trust Company Limited v Wong 20 April 2020, overturning the decision by Kawaley AJ at first instance and rejecting his use of the so-called substratum principle to limit the scope of widely drawn powers. The trust and wealth management industry should breath a collective sigh of relief. The industry is able to sell modern discretionary trusts to wealthy clients precisely because of their flexibility and the extent of the powers they contain, particularly discretionary powers of amendment, powers to add and remove beneficiaries and powers to distribute and resettle assets. The decision at first instance threatened to undermine that flexibility and to hamper the way in which trustees operate trusts of this kind. It is suggested that the Court of Appeal was right to reject the argument based on the supposed substratum rule. The argument gives inappropriate and independent life to what (if it is useful at all in this context) should only be a conclusionary metaphor; the argument involves what philosophers might describe as “unjustified reification”, or what the rest of us may think of as the tail wagging the dog. Use of the substratum metaphor risks distraction from the true task, that is, the proper construction of the words used in the relevant instrument in the light of the admissible factual matrix. The purpose of this article is to examine the Court of Appeal’s decision in Grand View, and tentatively to offer some thoughts on the analytical framework within which the validity of the exercise of powers is assessed.

This article examines whether the Asia-Pacific region’s geopolitical vicissitudes are causing Japan to ‘hedge’ against deepening uncertainty and risk through major strategic realignments or diversification of security and economic ties, as the original hedging literature would expect. It examines trends since 2009 in three domains fundamental to identifying whether shifts are underway in Japan’s strategic orientation vis-à-vis China: security policy (primary), trade/investment, and public opinion. Despite deepening uncertainty (and volatility), especially in ‘the Trump era’, this study finds negligible evidence of hedging behavior: e.g., realigning toward Beijing or adopting a ‘middle position’, much less developing any meaningful security ties with China. Rather, contemporary trends point in the opposite direction: Japan’s China strategy primarily centers on strengthening indigenous deterrence capabilities, bolstering the US–Japan alliance, and diversifying regional security ties beyond Beijing. Even the latter, somewhat paradoxically, aims to deepen ties with Washington and to keep it actively engaged in regional affairs.

The concept of biphasic, loglinear growth of the vertebrate brain is based on graphical displays of logarithmic transformations of the original measurements. Such displays commonly give the appearance of two distinct mathematical distributions – one set of observations following a steep trajectory at the low end of the size range and another set following a shallow trajectory at the high end. However, the appearance of two distributions is an artefact resulting from the logarithmic transformations. Observations of brain mass vs. body mass in each of the eight vertebrate species examined in the current investigation conform to a single mathematical distribution that is well described by a single equation fitted to the original, untransformed data by non-linear regression. Data for carp, chickens, kangaroos and rabbits are described by three-parameter power equations whereas those for dolphins and primates are described by exponential functions that rise rapidly to a maximum. The brain continues to grow throughout life in carp, chickens, kangaroos and rabbits but not in dolphins and primates. Future investigations of relative growth of the brain should be based on graphical and analytical study of observations expressed on the native mathematical scale.

A large behavioral economics literature is concerned with cognitive biases in individual and group decisions, including sequential decisions. These studies often find a negative path-dependency consistent with mechanisms such as the gambler's fallacy or contrast effects. We provide the first test for such biases in group decision making using observational data. Specifically, we study more than 27,000 verdicts adjudicated sequentially by over 900 juries for high-stake criminal cases at London's Old Bailey Criminal Court in the 18th and 19th centuries. Using jury fixed effects to account for heterogeneity in their baseline propensity to convict, we find that a previous guilty verdict significantly increases the chance of a subsequent guilty verdict by 6.7%–14.1%. This positive autocorrelation is robust to alternative estimation strategies, independent of jury experience and driven by the most recent lag and pairs of similar cases. Such positive path dependency may be explained by sequential assimilation effects, which may reflect a jury's desire to be internally consistent, and short-term “emotional” impacts of the characteristics and/or outcome of one case on another. As in modern-day jury studies, our results highlight that factors independent of the facts and evidence of the current case might affect jury behavior.

Informed consent requirements for medical research have expanded over the past half-century. The Declaration of Helsinki now includes an explicit positive obligation to inform subjects about funding sources. This is problematic in a number of ways and seems to oblige researchers to disclose information irrelevant to most consent decisions. It is argued here that such a problematic obligation involves an "informational fallacy." The aim in the second part of the paper is to provide a better approach to making sense of how a failure to inform about funding sources wrongs subjects: by making appeals to obligations to refrain from misleading by omission. This alternative approach-grounded in a general obligation to refrain from misleading, an obligation that is independent of informed consent-provides a basis for a norm that protects subjects' interests, without the informational fallacy. The approach developed here avoids the problems identified with the currently specified general obligation to inform about funding sources.

Bert Gunter and Christopher Tong use a chance meeting in an airport departure lounge to argue that widespread reliance on frequentist statistical inference cannot help but lead science astray

National audience

We investigate the "law of small numbers" using a data set on lotto gambling that allows us to measure players' reactions to draws. While most players pick the same set of numbers week after week, we find that those who do change, react on average as predicted by the law of small numbers as formalized in recent behavioral theory. In particular, players tend to bet less on numbers that have been drawn in the preceding week, as suggested by the "gambler's fallacy", and bet more on a number if it was frequently drawn in the recent past, consistent with the "hot-hand fallacy".

This article theoretically and empirically analyses behaviour in penny auctions, a relatively new auction mechanism. As in the US dollars or war-of-attrition, players in penny auctions commit higher non-refundable costs as the auction continues and only win if all other players stop bidding. I first show that, in any equilibria that does not end immediately, players bid probabilistically such that the expected profit from every bid is zero. Then, using two large data sets covering 166,000 auctions, I calculate that average profit margins actually exceed 50%. To explain this deviation, I incorporate a sunk-cost fallacy into the theoretical model to generate a set of predictions about hazard rates and player behaviour, which I confirm empirically. While players do (slowly) learn to correct this bias and there are few obvious barriers to competition, activity in the market is rising and concentration remains relatively high.

Background: This article is the result of a debate at the European Journal of Orthodontics Open Session in 2013 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Objective: The aim of this article is to highlight some of the strengths and weakness of clinical orthodontic research, with particular emphasis on randomized controlled trials (RCT). The ultimate aim of improving clinical orthodontic research in general. Design: This article is organized into two sections with arguments for and against RCTs. The backgrounds to evidence-based evaluation and the level or quality of evidence in trials are discussed. The article emphasises what makes high quality clinical research, and gives practical advice including examples of tips and potential pitfalls for those undertaking clinical research. Results and Conclusion: The overriding message is constructive and it is hoped that the article serves as an aid in evaluating, designing, conducting, and reporting clinical research.

As the social impact and role of international arbitration receives increasing attention, one central theme in this conundrum gains prominence: how do arbitrators decide cases? What influences arbitral decision-making? With the progressive opening of scholarship in the field to interdisciplinary approaches and studies going beyond doctrinal work, the question often takes the following form: do arbitrators apply the law, or do they make decisions based on something else – personal preferences, political biases, etc? When empirical studies fail to find significant statistical evidence of the role of extra-legal factors in their decision-making, the conclusion is drawn that arbitrators do indeed nothing else than apply the law. This article argues that the question so posed is an argumentative fallacy. Using the epistemology of legal realism and a simple methodology of law & economics, this article maintains that arbitrators, like every dispute resolver, are likely to always rely on both legal and extra-legal factors. It focuses on identifying, in the abstract, possible extra-legal factors which may amount to incentives and constraints placed by the current ecosystem of arbitration on arbitral decision-making.

This article is concerned with criminal trials where the defendant is a convicted felon with a prior conviction for the same offence. The article investigates a probabilistic argument that I will call the felony argument. According to the felony argument, the fact that the defendant has been previously convicted for the same offence has probative value in the present case, and increases the probability that the defendant is guilty. The article analyses the felony argument in Bayesian terms to pinpoint under what circumstances it is correct, and under what circumstances it comes to the wrong conclusion. This analysis shows that the felony argument is correct if the probability that a guilty defendant has been previously convicted for the same offence is higher than the probability that an innocent defendant has been previously convicted for the same offence. The problem with the felony argument is that the latter probability is not as low as one might think. It is not unlikely that an innocent defendant has been previously convicted for the same offence. In cases where the defendant is innocent, the cause behind the wrongful prosecution is often related to prior conviction, e.g. when photos of people with a prior conviction for the same offence are presented to an eyewitness and the witness mistakenly identifies a person who has nothing to do with the present case. Prior conviction for the same offence is used by the police as a criterion for selecting suspects, and this selection bias increases the probability that a defendant who is innocent has a prior conviction for the same offence. The defendant in a criminal trial is a person who belongs to a very special sample, the sample of people selected by the police as suspects and then selected for prosecution. An assessment of the probability that he/she is guilty, given a prior conviction for the same offence that does not take into account that he/she belongs to this sample, commits an error, that I call the felony fallacy. Language: en

Until recently women’s position on the British innovative poetry scene has been difficult to say the least, often risking being “doubly excluded,” as an anonymous writer is quoted in the introduction to Maggie O’Sullivan’s crucial 1996 anthology Out of Everywhere. Thankfully, women’s experimental writing now seems to be in a healthier state than ever, although the refusal of key figures Geraldine Monk and Maggie O’Sullivan to be included in Carrie Etter’s 2010 anthology: Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, reveals the need to be cautious about the gender label. As Monk and O’Sullivan declared as far back as 1984: ‘the most effective chance any woman has of dismantling the fallacy of male creative supremacy is simply by writing poetry of a kind which is liberating by the breadth of its range and innovation . . . to exploit and realise the full potential and importance of language.’ This article reflects on the risks entailed by identifying poets as ‘women’ poets in its examination of the work of three younger British writers working in the innovative ‘tradition’: Holly Pester, Sophie Robinson and SL Mendoza. The article uses a theoretical approach adapted from David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy’s recent study Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970-2010 (2013), proposing a modification of their key terms ‘voicing and unvoicing’ to ‘revoicing’.

Conceptual metaphors facilitate both productive and pernicious analogical reasoning. This article addresses the question: When and why does the frequently helpful use of metaphor become pernicious? By applying the most influential theoretical framework from cognitive psychology (structure-mapping theory) in analysing the philosophically most prominent example of pernicious metaphorical reasoning (the early modern transformation of �the mind�), we identify a philosophically relevant but previously undescribed fallacy in analogical reasoning with metaphors. We then outline an explanation of why even competent thinkers commit this fallacy and obtain a psychologically informed �debunking� explanation of the kind experimental philosophy�s �sources project� seeks.

I argue that when we interpret a literary work, we engage with at least two different kinds of meaning, each requiring a distinct mode of interpretation. These kinds of meaning are literary varieties of what Paul Grice called nonnatural and natural meaning. The long-standing debate that began with Beardsley and Wimsatt's attack on the intentional fallacy is, I argue, really a debate about nonnatural meaning in literature. I contend that natural meaning has been largely neglected in our theorizing about literary interpretation and that this comes at a serious cost, resulting in an inadequate account of what interpretation involves. I argue, first, that by recognizing that literary meaning includes both nonnatural and natural meaning, we are better placed to understand the interpreter's relationship with the author, and, second, that recognition of the distinction between nonnatural and natural meaning advances the established debate about literary meaning, offering support for actual intentionalism. The more inclusive view of literary meaning helps resolve an apparent difficulty raised by Noel Carroll.

In 1946, the physician and statistician Joseph Berkson (1899–1982) pointed out that two diseases that are independent in the general population may become ‘spuriously associated’ in hospital-based case-control studies.1 This spurious association was later referred to, often in lively debates,2–14 as Berkson’s fallacy, Berkson’s paradox or Berkson’s bias. Some authors restricted the interpretation of Berkson’s fallacy to disease-disease associations,2,5,7,8 whereas others thought that the fallacy would also apply to exposure-disease associations in hospital-based case-control studies.10–15 In this article we use directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to describe the structure of Berkson’s fallacy, first for disease-disease associations and then for exposure-disease associations. This permits us to understand the contentious debates and strongly differing opinions about Berkson’s fallacy, and has practical implications for study design and interpretation (see Box 1). Box 1. Practical implications of Berkson’s fallacy The fallacy that became eponymous for Berkson caused controversy from its initial formulation onwards. Some held that it biased all case-control studies in hospitals; others maintained that it was only pertinent for associations between prevalent diseases, and did not exist for exposure-disease associations. The DAG analyses in this paper show that Berkson’s fallacy can exist when studying exposure-disease associations, be it only in an ‘indirect’ form and in exceptional circumstances: when in a hospital-based case-control study persons with a prevalent diagnosis are enrolled who were hospitalized for another disease that is associated with this exposure. The DAG of the problem that Berkson originally described has the same structure of all biases due to conditioning on a collider, but cannot be endowed with a causal interpretation since it was formulated and worked out as a problem of the association of prevalent diseases. When using incident cases in hospital-based case-control studies, Berkson’s fallacy becomes highly unlikely for exposure-disease associations, unless there are many people who have developed two different new diseases more or less at the same time and are hospitalized for the other disease, i.e. the disease that is not the subject of the case-control study. When incident cases in a case-control study consist only of people who have been hospitalized for that disease, Berkson’s fallacy is not possible. It is likely that Berkson’s fallacy has had very limited, if any, impact on the findings of epidemiological studies.

This editorial refers to ‘Impact of clinical presentation on ischaemic and bleeding outcomes in patients receiving 6 or 24 month duration of dual antiplatelet therapy after stent implantation: a pre-specified anaylsis from the Prolonging Dual Antiplatelet Treatment After Grading Stent-Induced Intimal Hyperplasia (PRODIGY) trial’, by F. Costa et al. , on page doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehv038. In a letter published in 1935 in the journal Nature , Ronald Fisher, one of the fathers of modern statistical theory, described the phenomenon that had become known as ‘errors of the second kind’—that is, ‘the logical fallacy of believing that a hypothesis has been proved to be true, merely because it is not contradicted by the available facts … .’.1 He would go on to write, ‘It would … add greatly to the clarity with which the tests of significance are regarded if it were generally understood that tests of significance, when used accurately, are capable of rejecting or invalidating hypotheses, in so far as these are contradicted by the data; but that they are never capable of establishing them as certainly true.’ In the realm of randomized clinical trials, errors of the second kind, more commonly referred to as Type II error, are typically addressed during the assessment of statistical power for a given sample size. However, Type II error remains a critical consideration in the interpretation of trial results, particularly in subgroup assessments, which invariably are less highly powered than parent studies. Eighty years after Fisher's description of Type II error, Costa et al . provide a new opportunity to examine critically what constitutes sufficient evidence to declare that a treatment has no beneficial effect, this time in the …

The overgeneration argument attempts to show that accepting second-order validity as a sound formal counterpart of logical truth has the unacceptable consequence that the Continuum Hypothesis is either a logical truth or a logical falsehood. The argument was presented and vigorously defended in John Etchemendy’s The Concept of Logical Consequence and it has many proponents to this day. Yet it is nothing but a seductive fallacy. I demonstrate this by considering five versions of the argument; as I show, each is either unsound or lacks a troubling conclusion.

What does it mean for a patent holder to commit to a standard-setting organization (SSO) to license its standard-essential patents (SEPs) on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms? When is a royalty FRAND? Drawing from both legal theory and economic theory, I propose an interpretation of FRAND that distinguishes and reconciles the conflicting definitions of FRAND and provides courts a practical approach to identifying FRAND royalties. A proper understanding of a FRAND royalty requires recognizing the combinatorial value of standard-essential patents. That recognition reveals the fallacy in attempting to apply the “ex ante incremental value” rule to the determination of a FRAND royalty. FRAND royalties divide the aggregate royalties generated by the standard among the holders of patents essential to the standard. Such a division should maximize the surplus resulting from the standard’s creation. It must also satisfy an individual-rationality constraint for the patent holder and the licensee, thereby encouraging continued participation in the setting and implementation of open standards, as opposed to greater reliance on proprietary standards.

This essay explores the Ancrene Wisse’s claim that ‘reading is good prayer’. Prayer represents a challenge to both the Affective Fallacy and modern conceptions of authorship The repetitive aesthetics of prayer – both of and within the texts - are central to their practical devotional purposes. The Wooing Group prayers and the Ancrene Wisse constitute an anchoritic ‘emotional regime’, which encourages habits of affective sincerity via meditative reading. Textuality, however, foregrounds the distance between the individual and God, which ‘pure’ prayer aims to close. These texts retain a certain latency of meaning, awaiting instantiation in the lives of their readers.

We come to this forum not to advocate for actor-network theory (ANT) but to raise friendly questions about its role in International Relations (IR). As outsiders to ANT, we recognize that these issues may be addressed within that broader literature. But since we are proponents of the use of frameworks that share with ANT a commitment to the analytical priority of processes, relations, and practices, we also have a particular interest in its development within our field. This forum arrives at an interesting moment for IR. Scholars working within a broadly social-constructionist framework increasingly draw upon relational and practice-theoretical approaches. Relational theories, ranging from those using the methodology of social network analysis (SNA) to post-structuralist modes of analysis, are recasting how we think about levels of analysis, actors, and the importance of social position. Practice theory revisits basic dichotomies that organize IR theory, including rationality and practicality, subjectivity and objectivity, and the ideal and the material. Relationalism and practice-theoretical accounts have demonstrated their utility in overcoming analytical problems involving, for example, the agent-structure problem and the relationship between continuity and change (Jackson and Nexon ⇓; Hafner-Burton, Kahler, and Montgomery ⇓; Adler and Pouliot ⇓). Actor-network theory shares many of the sensibilities of these two approaches. If anything, it pushes their criticisms of the process-reduction fallacy further. We read ANT as, in part, arguing that common analytic moves associated with other forms of relational and practice-turn theory effectively reify processes. This is certainly a danger for some kinds of social network analysis, practice-analytic theories, and discourse analysis. Specific studies deploying these frameworks risk designating their units of analysis as “real, solid, proven, or entrenched” (Latour ⇓:28). Consider the growing body of IR work on social networks and practices that treats them as static things rather than an …

Objective. The discovery of neuroplastic phenom- ena such as central sensitization of nociception has challenged pain theory to evolve, to encompass unpredictable and unlikely chronic pain states, and to cope with the emerging complexity of the brain. Recently, the proposition that chronic pain is a disease in its own right has gained currency, based upon functional and structural changes in the brain constituting a distinctive pathology. Proponents have expanded the theory to identify "eudynia" ("good" pain) and "maldynia" ("bad" pain). Methods. A critical examination of the proposition that chronic pain is a disease was conducted within the framework of evolution of pain medicine theory. Results. Three dominant theories were identified: specificity theory (the "hard-wired" nervous system); neuroplasticity theory (the "soft-wired" nervous system); and pain-as-a-disease. The pro- gression from specificity theory to neuroplasticity theory was based upon empirical evidence and con- ceptual clarity. The latter theory confronts the uncer- tainty and the unpredictability of pain, and offers explanations for conditions where ongoing noxious input is not discernible. However, not only does pain- as-a-disease elevate the neurophysiological mecha- nisms underlying the experience of chronic pain to the status of a disease, but also it conceives of pain as a "thing" that is itself capable of producing an effect. This reasoning is found to be faulty on two grounds: the confusion of pain as a symptom, a cause, and a pathology; and the fallacy that can arise when an interpretation is claimed to be a truth. Conclusions. The proposition that chronic pain is a disease cannot be supported on clinical and path- ological grounds, as well as in terms of ways of knowing. The promulgation of "good" and "bad" pain has the potential to obstruct necessary dialogue for advancing the science and treatment of pain. We suggest a way forward to resolve this impasse.

More than one hundred years ago, the US Supreme Court began to refer to social science evidence in its judgments. However, this has not resonated with many constitutional courts outside the United States, in particular, in Continental Europe. This contribution has a twofold aim. First, it tries to show that legal reasoning in constitutional law is often based on empirical assumptions so that there is a strong need for the use of social sciences. However, constitutional courts often lack the necessary expertise to deal with empirical questions. Therefore, I will discuss three potential strategies to make use of social science evidence. Judges can interpret social facts on their own, they can afford a margin of appreciation to the legislature, or they can defer the question to social science experts. It will be argued that none of these strategies is wholly satisfactory, with the result that courts will have to employ a combination of different strategies. In order to illustrate the argument, I will discuss decisions of different jurisdictions, including the United States, Canada, Germany, and South Africa.

The No-Miracles Argument has a natural representation as a probabilistic argument. As such, it commits the base-rate fallacy. In this article, I argue that a recent attempt to show that there is still a serviceable version that avoids the base-rate fallacy fails, and with it all realistic hope of resuscitating the argument.

The contemporary wide-scale austerity measures are likely to fail in most countries. The first fallacy derives from the false diagnosis that the present crisis is the outcome of lax public spending policy, when it is actually the outcome of a private credit-led speculative boom. The second fallacy assumes the possibility or even the generality of the so-called 'expansionary fiscal contractions': this neglects the short-term negative effects on domestic demand and overestimates the generality of Ricardian equivalence, the importance of 'crowd in' effects related to lower interest rates and the positive impact on trade balances. The third fallacy 'one size fits all' is problematic since Greece and Portugal cannot replicate the hard-won German success. Their productive, institutional and political configurations differ drastically and, thus, they require different policies. The fourth fallacy states that the spill over from one country to another may resuscitate the inefficient and politically risky 'beggar my neighbour' policies from the interwar period. Copyright The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

It is uncontroversial that, on any run through a Sorites series, a subject, at some point, switches from an ‘F’ verdict on one exhibit to a non-‘F’ verdict on the next. (Where this ‘cut-off’ point occurs tends to differ from trial to trial.) It is a fallacy to infer that there must be a cut-off point simpliciter between F items and non-F items. The transition is from firm ground to swamp. In the Sorites reasoning, some conditionals of the form ‘If Item n is F, then Item n+1 is F’ are not false but nonsensical. This solution respects boundarylessness.

Prior research indicates that older adults (60+ years) are less subject to the sunk-cost fallacy compared with younger adult college students. The objective of this research was to determine if age-related differences in decisions about sunk costs reflected differences in what was salient to individuals about the situation when they described their decision-making goals.Using hypothetical decision-making scenarios, we examined older (N = 21) and younger (N = 20) adults' decisions about sunk costs. Participants responded to open-ended interview questions about their decision-making goals. A coding scheme was developed using qualitative methods and was used to reliably categorize the issues and concerns people expressed when describing their decision-making goals.Compared with younger adults, older adults were less likely to commit the sunk-cost fallacy and were more likely to make normatively correct decisions. When describing their goals, older adults were less likely to focus on the presence or absence of the prior investment (the sunk cost). The salience of investment-related information to individuals when describing their goals mediated age-related differences in the sunk-cost fallacy and normatively correct decisions.The results illustrate how consideration of people's own perspectives of decision-making situations may inform understanding of age-related differences in decision-making fallacies.

The "prosecutor's fallacy" (the assumption that Pr [probability] (A|B) = Pr (B|A)) arises often in epidemiology but is often unrecognized as such, in part because investigators do not have strong intuitions about what the fallacy means. Here, we help inform such intuitions and remind investigators of this fallacy by using visualizations. In figures, we demonstrate the prosecutor's fallacy, as well as show conditions under which Pr (A|B) can be assumed to be equal to Pr (B|A). Visualizations can help build intuition around statistical concepts such as the prosecutor's fallacy and should be more widely considered as teaching tools.

We thank Snoep et al. for their commentary offering valuable perspective on Berkson’s classic and important paper and the controversies that followed. We wish here to mention what we feel is an important point arising from their discussion, and use this to highlight some interesting features of using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to discuss issues relating to selection bias and missing data.

Consumers hold a common intuition about their preferences for familiar things (e.g., “comfort food”) in times of upheaval. This lay theory holds that familiar goods are attractive as a respite from dynamic environments and reflects a naive prediction that familiar favorites ameliorate the cognitive or emotional load associated with change. Conversely, the research in this article finds that consumers are more rather than less likely to choose novel options during times of upheaval and suggests that this paradox may occur because of the discrepancy between consumers’ strategic lay theories and more automatic mind‐set influences. Five studies demonstrate (1) that the comfort food fallacy effect occurs for both food and nonfood choices (despite consumer predictions to the contrary), (2) that increasing consumers’ perception of life change decreases choice of familiar favorites, and (3) that the effect disappears with high involvement. Understanding this paradox of comfort consumption may help both consumers ...

A proper economic analysis of whether a regulated firm has—or, more accurately, would, in the absence of regulation, have—market power is a significantly different exercise from a typical market power analysis of an unregulated firm. We show that applying the usual tools of market power analysis to firms in regulated industries can lead to predictably erroneous outcomes. Prices set by regulatory fiat at below-cost levels would cause what we term the “reverse cellophane fallacy.” The uneconomically low prices cause other services to appear to be weaker substitutes than they would be at compensatory prices and therefore lead to improperly narrow market definitions and erroneous inferences of market power. This in turn leads to the self-perpetuation of regulation, in which regulators insist on finding that the incumbent lacks market power before deregulating prices, whereas the artificially restricted prices lead to an erroneous inference of market power. We test this hypothesis empirically by examining a sample of geographic “markets” (incumbent exchange service areas) in a single U.S. state in 2004. Our findings indicate that the relative absence of competition in rural areas should not be interpreted as evidence that the incumbent would be able to exercise market power absent price regulation.

The loanable funds controversy cannot be settled without prior agreement on the meanings of income and equilibrium. The essential claim of loanable funds theory is that disequilibrium in the goods market affects the rate of interest. This paper introduces financial accounting concepts and a new understanding of the principle of effective demand to clarify that loanable funds theory relies on a concept of income other than current income, namely yesterday's income in the case of Robertson, or full-employment equilibrium income in the case of Hicks. In Robertson's case, this is a matter of bad accounting, a confusion between an income statement and a balance sheet. In Hicks's more subtle case, it is about the inapplicability of Walras' Law to a monetary economy. Keynes's principle embodies a Marshallian concept of system equilibrium under which the goods market is treated as never in disequilibrium in the sense required by loanable funds theory. Copyright The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Many international relations (IR) theories examining the identity/alterity nexus share a dichotomized vision of the social and political reality sustaining their approach to “identity” by dividing the latter into either its “corporate” or its “social” dimension. This dichotomized conception of the social and political falls into what Norbert Elias termed “process-reduction,” a fallacy leading to an isolation and essentialization of certain aspects of processes and bracketing the inherent eventness of the “international.” This paper will theoretically identify the shortcomings of this dichotomized vision and then provide an empirical narration of what a non-dichotomized conception can look like and consider how it provides us with a more acute rendering of the social and political dimensions of collective political identity formation and politics of representation. To do so, a dialogical understanding of the variety of constellations of collective political identities that have informed questions regarding multiculturalism ranging from the Tokugawa (1603–1867) to the Taishō (1912–1926) eras in Japan will be developed.

Background W S Robinson made a seminal contribution by demonstrating that correlations for the same two variables can be different at the individual and ecologic level. This study reanalyzes and historically situates Robinson's influential study that laid the foundation for the primacy of analyzing data at only the individual level. Methods We applied a binomial multilevel logistic model to analyse variation in illiteracy as enumerated by the 1930 US. Census (the same data as used by Robinson). The outcome was log odds of being illiterate, while predictors were race/nativity (‘native whites’, ‘foreign-born whites’ and ‘negroes’) at the individual-level, and presence of Jim Crow segregation laws for education at the state-level. We conducted historical research to identify the social and scientific context within which Robinson's study was produced and favourably received. Results Empirically, the substantial state variations in illiteracy could not be accounted by the states' race/nativity composition. Different approaches to modelling state-effects yielded considerably attenuated associations at the individual-level between illiteracy and race/nativity. Furthermore, state variation in illiteracy was different across the race/nativity groups, with state variation being largest for whites and least for foreign-born whites. Strong effects of Jim Crow education laws on illiteracy were observed with the effect being strongest for blacks. Historically, Robinson's study was consonant with the post-World War II ascendancy of methodological individualism. Conclusion Applying a historically informed multilevel perspective to Robinson's profoundly influential study, we demonstrate that meaningful analysis of individual-level relationships requires attention to substantial heterogeneity in state characteristics. The implication is that perils are posed by not only ecological fallacy but also individualistic fallacy. Multilevel thinking, grounded in historical and spatiotemporal context, is thus a necessity, not an option.

The usual search for explanations and solutions for the research-practice gap tends to analyze ways to communicate evidence-based practice guidelines to practitioners more efficiently and effectively from the end of a scientific pipeline. This examination of the pipeline looks upstream for ways in which the research itself is rendered increasingly irrelevant to the circumstances of practice by the process of vetting the research before it can qualify for inclusion in systematic reviews and the practice guidelines derived from them. It suggests a 'fallacy of the pipeline' implicit in one-way conceptualizations of translation, dissemination and delivery of research to practitioners. Secondly, it identifies a 'fallacy of the empty vessel' implicit in the assumptions underlying common characterizations of the practitioner as a recipient of evidence-based guidelines. Remedies are proposed that put emphasis on participatory approaches and more practice-based production of the research and more attention to external validity in the peer review, funding, publication and systematic reviews of research in producing evidence-based guidelines.

The principal question in terms of assessing the interaction between human rights applica- ble both in peacetime and war and humanitarian law applicable only to armed confl icts is whether the protection accorded to individuals under the latter is lower than that under the former. The clarifi cation of this question requires the accurate assessment of the available evidence, and not the preconceived approach that tends to conceive one of these two fi elds as lex specialis that excludes or curtails the protection under the other fi eld. This contribution examines the various aspects of this problem, such as the general interaction between human rights law and humanitarian law, and the relevance of particular human rights in the context of armed confl icts. The evidence dealt with in the course of this analysis exposes the fallacy of the argument that the humanitarian law protection may be lower than that under human rights law.

In "Dworkin's Fallacy, Or What the Philosophy of Language Can't Teach Us About the Law," I described a common fallacy among philosophers of law, in which jurisprudential conclusions are misderived from semantic premises, and argued that the fallacy can be found in Ronald Dworkin's classic book, "Law's Empire." Dworkin responds to my essay in his most recent book, "Justice in Robes," where he claims that, rather than committing Dworkin's fallacy in "Law's Empire," he "took pains to warn against it." This paper is a reply to Dworkin. I argue that his response to my essay, far from showing that he did not commit Dworkin's fallacy, is itself an example of the fallacy. But this paper is also a critique of Dworkin's larger argument in "Justice in Robes," for I claim that Dworkin's fallacy pervades his most recent book just as much as it did in "Law's Empire." Dworkin repeatedly treats theories of law - both his own and his adversaries' - as if they were, or were entailed by, semantic positions. Because he succumbs to Dworkin's fallacy, his descriptions of his own views on semantic issues are unreliable, and I spend much of the paper teasing out what I believe is Dworkin's latent semantic theory.

There are widely held views of how the jurisdiction of an online contract should be established. Cyber-liberterians favour a separate cyberspace jurisdiction, maintaining that online activities should be regulated entirely separately without recourse to national courts and laws. Traditionalists maintain that the existing paradigms of location and activity are capable of determining the jurisdiction of an online contract. What is agreed is that the dematerialised nature of online activity renders the location of the parties and the place where their commercial activities take place difficult to determine. Whilst Reed's “Cyberspace Fallacy” acknowledges the challenges in determining the jurisdiction of an online contract, that author also reminds us that such challenges are not new. A variety of connecting factors have been used to establish jurisdiction of a contract conducted by electronic means. As Zekos suggested recently in an article in this Journal, 2 consideration must be given to a new means of determining the jurisdiction of an online contract. It is the purpose of this article firstly, to highlight the difficulties with the operation of existing connecting factors in establishing the jurisdiction of an electronic contract and secondly to propose how “intentional targeting” – if properly defined - can provide an efficient and adaptive connecting factor to determine the jurisdiction of an electronic consumer contract.

In a recent article Bigler criticized the utilization of the Daubert criterion in "motions to exclude". He cited attempts to deny trial acceptability of assessment results derived from neuropsychological batteries that were not fixed or standardized. He argues that the Halstead-Reitan battery (HRB) would be the only acceptable battery. Also, he argues that the HRB is out of date, since it was originally 'standardized' 50 years ago. This argument commits the "archaeological fallacy", that a procedure or information is invalid when it was originally developed some time in the past. To the contrary the HRB, along with several other fixed and standardized batteries have recently been validated as well as in the past. By contrast, flexible assessment procedures have never been validated at any time.

It is an oft-repeated cliché that ‘smart is sexy,’ and while cynics may find plenty of reason to scoff at the thought, some solace can be taken in the economic success and increase in the social cachet of the ‘historically informed performance’ (or HIP) movement. Countless millions of people over the last thirty years have been drawn to the world of medieval and renaissance music, many as a result of the exciting new sounds created through the thoughtful synthesis of artistic and intellectual sensibility demonstrated in historical reconstructions of early instruments and their playing techniques. In light of this economic and cultural success, it therefore seems fitting to take a step back and think about how individuals today arrive at a view of historical reality in the world of instrumental performance, especially when faced with images and artifacts which may be interpreted in many different ways. This research, as ‘an authentic expression of our contemporary cultural condition bringing new experiences and insights into our world,’ 1 is immensely valuable. However, are we justified in going further and asserting that our modern reconstructive work sheds light on ‘the way things actually were,’ or in other words, that it reveals objective historical truth? In the following pages I will take a closer look at the research methodology of historically informed performance and propose a refinement based on a probabilistic analysis of the data produced. While the areas of research which might benefit from such an inquiry are virtually unlimited, my specific focus for the purposes of this exercise is the harp technique in late medieval and early renaissance Wales. This is one branch of the musicological tree which remains relatively infrequently visited in early music circles, yet one which, as we will see, is richly rewarding when explored through the multifaceted methodology and interdisciplinary orientation of modern HIP research.

This paper studies whether intra-developing country price competition has significant effects on the short-run growth of output in developing countries that are specialised in manufactured exports. Regression estimates using the generalised method of moments applied to annual panel data for 17 semi-industrialised countries in 1983-2004 show that these countries exhibit a ‘fallacy of composition’, in the sense that a real depreciation relative to competing developing country exporters increases the home country's growth rate at the expense of its competitors' growth. The results also suggest that real depreciations for these developing countries relative to the industrialised countries are contractionary.

Hodge's (2005) article, "Epistemological Frameworks, Homosexuality, and Religion: How People of Faith Understand the Intersection between Homosexuality and Religion," asserts a mutually exclusive irreconcilable worldview that will always separate Evangelical Christians and the gay and lesbian community. Despite Hodge's stated motives to increase tolerance of diversity, his deceptive arguments could potentially aggravate the hostility that already exists between some Christians and members of sexual minority groups. Hodge makes his assertions using certain frameworks and concepts to set the terms of the discourse in a preferred and skewed manner. Through a seemingly reasoned discourse, Hodge attempts a specious argument that people of faith are oppressed within the social work profession, the greater community, and most particularly by the gay and lesbian community. It is distressing that many of the problems with Hodge's writings continue despite having been addressed by others. These problems include incorrect definitions (Bennett, 2003), misquoting or misinterpreting sources (Canda, 2003; van Wormer, 2003), methodological issues, and use of outmoded frameworks (Liecthy, 2003). We will not attempt to deal with every fallacy, tautology, and misrepresentation in the article. Rather, we focus our critique of Hodge's work on four areas: (1) its erroneous definition of oppression; (2) unsubstantiated and monolithic generalizations about the beliefs of Christians; (3) its unfounded claims of oppression of Christian people; and on the bases of (4) freedom of speech, academic discourse, and social work ethics. Hodge's article brings to mind another instance of recasting history and social conflict; that of the "revisionist historians" more accurately called Holocaust deniers. Shermer and Grobman (2000) accurately renamed these individuals deniers of historical facts, not revisers. More importantly these authors, although noting the understandable outrage experienced by many Holocaust survivors and legitimate historians, insist that the critical issue is one of free speech. They respond with a careful analysis and deconstruction of what appears to be objective and scholarly. Their willingness to give deniers an authentic hearing is in the service of being able to deconstruct the false claims of individuals advancing a political agenda under the guise of scholarship. In like manner, we present our response to selected aspects of Hodge's article. HOW ARE OPPRESSION AND DISCRIMINATION DEFINED? Hodge's glib use of the terms oppression and discrimination without clearly defining them is misleading. He assumes a shared definitional understanding when in fact his use of the words is not in keeping with the definitions articulated in diversity, multiculturalism, and anti-oppression work (Adams et al., 2000). Furthermore, he references key figures in anti-oppression work in obfuscating ways. Careful review of the literature cited by Hodge demonstrates his misinterpretation and selective use of definitional frameworks and "evidence" to support his premise of discrimination against religiously committed individuals. Most important, he confounds individual acts of mean-spiritedness with structural forms of oppression. The use of civil rights and diversity language by dominant groups to reassert their privilege and power is not new. Take, for example, the issue of whether affirmative action harms white men. Pincus's (2003) study suggests that although there are individual episodes of white men being discriminated against, there is no evidence that white men are systematically discriminated against and thus harmed as a group by affirmative action policies and practices. However, some continue to assert affirmative action harms white men as a group. This is a highly emotionally charged idea that many continue to believe, despite lack of evidence. Hodge alleges discrimination against certain religious groups in a similarly unsubstantiated and inflammatory manner. …

It is the beginning of a powerful argument for an experiential account of aesthetic value that one must experience an artwork for oneself in order to appreciate its aesthetic value. One can know that some hero is a great man from an accurate description of his actions or characteristics in nonnormative terms; similarly for a great computer or any other machine. But the aesthetic value of artworks is manifest only in experiencing them for oneself. This point has been made many times by many philosophers of art. Typically, they seek an explanation for it in some peculiar logical relation between the nonaesthetic properties of artworks and their aesthetic properties. But the less mysterious explanation is threefold: first and foremost, that the aesthetic value of artworks lies only in the experience of them; second, that the context in which any property of an artwork is experienced can radically alter the experience of it; and third, that different observers, even fully qualified observers, can experience the same objective properties of artworks differently. If the value of artworks lies in the experience of them, and if that experience varies with context and observer, then one must experience artworks in order to appreciate their value. (What may look like the fallacy of affirming the consequent is really an inference to the best explanation.) That the aesthetic value of artworks lies in the

explicitly the chief programmatic fallacy committed by those who argue so strongly for the importance of heritability measures for human traits. The fallacy is that a knowledge of the heritability of some trait in a population provides an index of the efficacy of environmental or clinical intervention in altering the trait either in individuals or in the population as a whole. This fallacy, sometimes propagated even by geneticists, who should know better, arises from the confusion between the technical meaning of heritablility and the everyday meaning of the word. A trait can have a heritability of 1.0 in a population at some time, yet this could be completely altered in the future by a simple environmental change. If this were not the case, ‘inborn errors of metabolism’ would be forever incurable, which is patently untrue. But the misunderstanding about the relationship between heritability and phenotypic plasticity is not simply the result of an ignorance of genetics on the part of psychologists and electronic engineers. It arises from the entire system of analysis of causes through linear models, embodied in the analysis of variance and covariance and in path analysis. It is indeed ironic that while Morton and his colleagues dispute the erroneous programmatic conclusions that are drawn from the analysis of human phenotypic variation, they nevertheless rely heavily for their analytic techniques on the very linear models that are responsible for the confusion. I would like to look rather closely at the problem of the analysis of causes in human genetics and to try to understand how the underlying model of this analysis moulds our view of the real world. I will begin by saying some very obvious and elementary things about causes, but I will come thereby to some very annoying conclusions.