Confession evidence,psychological vulnerability and expert testimony

There have been major changes in English Law with regard to confession evidence, which followed the implementation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) in January 1986. This paper reviews the main legal changes that are relevant to the admissibility and reliability of confessions and their psychological importance within the context of both research and expert testimony.     

理性看待微创外科

所谓“微创”,乃是传统外科发展的伸延和提升。微创不等于无创,微创需要科学的决策,同时微创要运用循证医学。微创具有广阔的前景,但它的治疗之路依然很长。它需要进一步的完善。目前,还不是丰收的季节。     

正确认识医疗诉讼的举证责任倒置、规范医务人员的医疗行为

针对就如何正确理解医疗诉讼举证责任倒置的规定,举证责任倒置给我国医疗卫生界带来挑战,以及如何适应举证责任倒置规定等问题进行了论述,提出了提高医务人员法律素质,依法行医,防范医疗纠纷的办法。     

Diversity-Based Reasoning in Children

One of the hallmarks of inductive reasoning by adults is the diversity effect, namely that people draw stronger inferences from a diverse set of evidence than from a more homogenous set of evidence. However, past developmental work has not found consistent diversity effects with children age 9 and younger. We report robust sensitivity to diversity in children as young as 5, using everyday stimuli such as pictures of objects with people. Experiment 1 showed the basic diversity effect in 5- to 9-year-olds. Experiment 2 showed that, like adults, children restrict their use of diversity information when making inferences about remote categories. Experiment 3 used other stimulus sets to overcome an alternate explanation in terms of sample size rather than diversity effects. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that children more readily draw on diversity when reasoning about objects and their relations with people than when reasoning about objects' internal, hidden properties, thus partially explaining the negative findings of previous work. Relations to cross-cultural work and models of induction are discussed.     

循证医学及其在心血管疾病中的应用

循证医学作为一门新兴的学科,对医学的研究和实践将产生越来越大的影响。在循证医学的操作过程中,如何正确评价和应用所获得的证据极为重要。在短短的十几年间,循证医学给心血管疾病的临床实践带来了根本的变化。     

循证医学的辩证思维

随着临床医学的发展,临床医生面临着从理论知识加个人经验的医学模式向以科学证据为基础的医学模式转变。越来越多的卫生政策和诊疗指南的制定需要以高质量的研究结果为依据,如随机对照研究的结果,特别是随机对照研究的系统综述结论。循证医学模式要求医生在临床工作中不断提出问题并通过严格的科研设计来回答这些问题,同时强调不断进行知识更新,掌握最新研究证据以指导其临床工作。同时政府部门也鼓励发展循证医疗,因为它可通过研究有效的诊疗手段来提高卫生保健的效率。此外还有迹象表明法律决策过程中要参考是否遵循了研究证据和临床指南。知情的服务对象也促使临床工作者寻求研究证据作为依据,为了提高服务质量并且充分把握特殊专业领域的现状,临床工作者也需要不断了解新的依据信息。在众多的研究信息中,我们应对每项证据的研究方法、研究对象及观察的终点进行认真分析,确定该结论是否真实并适合我们的实际,从而制定有据可查的诊疗方案。     

Do looks constitute our perceptual evidence?

Many philosophers take experience to be an essential aspect of perceptual justification. I argue against a specific variety of such an experientialist view, namely, the Looks View of perceptual justification, according to which our visual beliefs are mediately justified by beliefs about the way things look. I describe three types of cases that put pressure on the idea that perceptual justification is always related to looks‐related reasons: unsophisticated cognizers, multimodal identification, and amodal completion. I then provide a tentative diagnosis of what goes wrong in the Looks View: it ascribes a specific epistemic role to beliefs about looks that is actually fulfilled by subpersonal perceptual processes.     

Confirmation of Scientific Hypotheses as Relations

Summary  In spite of several attempts to explicate the relationship between a scientific hypothesis and evidence, the issue still cries for a satisfactory solution. Logical approaches to confirmation, such as the hypothetico-deductive method and the positive instance account of confirmation, are problematic because of their neglect of the semantic dimension of hypothesis confirmation. Probabilistic accounts of confirmation are no better than logical approaches in this regard. An outstanding probabilistic account of confirmation, the Bayesian approach, for instance, is found to be defective in that it treats evidence as a formal entity and this creates the problem of relevance of evidence to the hypothesis at issue, in addition to the difficulties arising from the subjective interpretation of probabilities. This essay purports to satisfy the need for a successful account of hypothesis confirmation by offering an original formulation based on the notion of instantiation of the relation urged by an hypothesis.