Health care may be the most regulated industry in the United States, at least in terms of the volume of State and Federal laws and regulations that affect business practices. Lawyers who counsel health care clients often face a dilemma: is the client seeing legitimate advice about the legal limitations on his or her conduct, or is the client seeking to use the lawyer's skills to evade the law? The history of health care fraud prosecutions involving lawyers and other professional (...) advisors in recent years makes this an issue of more than academic interest. The well publicized case of U.S. v. Anderson, in which health care counsel faced charges as co-defendants for purported kickback violations, the recent prosecution of Ernst & Young for allegedly aiding Medicare fraud on behalf of client hospitals, and the recent indictment and conviction of an in-house lawyer in a national durable medical equipment fraud case, make clear that the wrongful use of legal advice by health care clients can lead to significant criminal and civil charges against attorneys. (shrink)

I would try to reduce the anxiety to realizing that seemingly the same proposition is really different when it is false by pointing out that the contents of two of our beliefs can be different when we think they are the same as well as being the same when we think they are different. That is, belief contents are not infallibly known or knowable in conscious reflective awareness of beliefs. Trying or wanting to accurately perceive what you are thinking does (...) not guarantee success. We can be wrong even about what we believe our beliefs are we don't and maybe can't realize that two beliefs are contradictory). (shrink)

Intermediate Quantitifiers presents and analyzes the logical and linguistic features of intermediate quantifiers, in a fashion typical of traditional logic. Intermediate quantifiers express logical quantities which fall between Aristotle's two quantities of categorical propositions - the universal and the particular. This book is the first to use traditional methods to integrate the logic and semantics of intermediate quantifiers with the two traditional quantities. Few, many and most express the most commonly referred to intermediate quantities, yet in this book Peterson argues (...) that an infinite number of additional quantities can be understood through a deeper examination of the logical nature of all intermediate quantifiers. Drawing on the work of Robert Carnes and taking a critical look at James McCawley's grammatical analysis, Peterson concludes that a new approach to foundations of mathematics based on the syllogistic logic of quantifiers is possible.Offering invaluable insights for those studying across areas of logic, linguistics, and the philosophy or semantics of natural language, this book presents the completion of an explanation for extending traditional syllogistic logic to handle intermediate quantifiers. (shrink)

Factive predicates (like ‘-matters’, ‘discover-’, ‘realizes-’) take NPs that refer to facts, propositional predicates (like ‘-seems’, ‘believes-’, ‘-likely’) take NPs that refer to propositions, and eventive predicates (like ‘-occurs’, ‘-take place’, ‘-causes-’) take NPs that refer to events (broadly speaking, including states, processes, conditions, ect.). Logically speaking at least two out of the three categories (facts, propositions, and events) can be eliminated. So, if all three kinds of referents turn out to be required for natural language semantics, their postulation is (...) empirically significant since a priori logical considerations do not require all of them.Pronominalization evidence inter alia raises questions about the distinctness of facts, events, and propositions. Two proposals for resolving the pronominalization dilemmas are, first, that abstract elements exist which contain the genuine antecedents for the pronouns (co-reference remaining both syntactic and semantic) and second, that syntactic co-reference is simply distinct from semantic co-reference. The first proposal hardly works at all, since it requires the postulation of many abstract elements and associated unmotivated deletion (or insertion) rules. The second proposal works for all the examples considered. Prior to discussing the two proposals, I show how any two of the three categories can be logically eliminated, a demonstration which also produces some hypothetical abstract elements of use in discussing both proposals. I conclude with some brief remarks on reference versus coreference. (shrink)

Some of the controversy surrounding the Duhemian claim that in science falsification is as inconclusive as verification is reconsidered. The D-Thesis, a particular version of this claim first discussed by Adolf Grünbaum, is formulated in a more precise and perspicuous fashion as a conjunction of two subtheses. Grünbaum's attempt to refute one of the subtheses by means of a geometrical counterexample and some subsequent discussions of this example are examined critically. An argument designed to prove the other subthesis is analyzed (...) and shown to be unsuccessful. It is concluded that the D-Thesis is as yet neither proven nor refuted. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging study, Quinn argues that human moral autonomy is compatible with unqualified obedience to divine commands. He formulates several versions of the crucial assumptions of divine command ethics, defending them against a battery of objections often expressed in the philosophical literature.

Suppose that a person P 1 dies some time during 1978. Many years later, the resurrection world, a perennial object of Christian concern, begins on the morning of the day of judgment. On its first morning there are in that world distinct persons, P 2 and P 3 , each of whom is related in remarkably intimate ways to P 1 . You are to imagine that each of them satisfies each of the criteria or conditions necessary for identity with (...) P 1 to some extent, that both of them satisfy these conditions to exactly the same extent, and that every other denizen of the resurrection world satisfies each of these conditions to a lesser extent than P 2 and P 3 do. Thus, for example, philosophers often claim that bodily continuity is a necessary condition for personal identity. If it is, you might assume that the body P 2 has on the morning of the day of judgment contains some of the same atoms the body of P1 1 contained when P 1 died, and that P 2 's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P 1 's body at the time of death just in case P 3 's body on that day contains exactly n atoms from P 1 's body at the time of death. Or, again, some philosophers hold that connectedness of memory is necessary for personal identity. If so, you are to suppose that on the morning of the day of judgment P 3 seems to remember some of the events in the life of P 1 having happened to him, and that P 3 seems to remember a certain event in the life of P 1 having happened to him just in case P 2 seems to remember that very event in the life of P 1 having happened to him. You are to fill in the details by adding complete parity between P 2 and P 3 with respect to similarity of DNA molecules, character traits and whatever else you deem relevant to personal identity. And, finally, you are to complete the story by imagining that P 2 and P 3 live very different sorts of lives in the resurrection world. To heighten the poignancy of the story, you might imagine that P 2 enjoys forever after the beatitude promised to the blessed while P 3 suffers the everlasting torments reserved for the damned. (shrink)

The distinctions among facts, propositions, and events are supported by linguistic analyses segregating factive, propositional, and eventive predicates. The concepts of fact, proposition, and event may be basic categories of human understanding, as well as being ontologically significant. FPE theory was developed in part to reject the identification of facts with true propositions. The degree of ‘fineness’ of individuations within each category results from how closely event-, fact-, or proposition-individuation mirrors linguistic semantic structure. Event structure is not reflected in many (...) event phrases. Fact- and proposition-structure typically does reflect semantic structures of factive and propositional clauses. The relevant properties for event individuation are all expressible by eventive predicates. Fact and proposition individuation is not as straightforward, because so many factives and propositionals do not express properties relevant to the Leibnizian principle. The intractability of proposition individuation may be overcome through an explanation of fact cognition. (shrink)

Horrendous evils may be considered in a religious context (as in the paper by m mcc adams to which this is a reply). An example from tolstoy of a nonreligious case is discussed. Professor adams's arguments for the refusal of the christian to be overwhelmed by horrendous evils are evaluated in the light of this. They are found inadequate on two grounds: (i) inadequate treatment of the mattering of others; (ii) they undermine the unqualified moral judgment presupposed in the characterization (...) of suffering as 'horrendous evils'. (shrink)

This paper is a study of a pragmatic argument for belief in the existence of God constructed and criticized by Richard Gale. The argument’s conclusion is that religious belief is morally permissible under certain circumstances. Gale contends that this moral permission is defeated in the circumstances in question both because it violates the principle of universalizability and because belief produces an evil that outweighs the good it promotes. My counterargument tries to show that neither of the reasons invoked by Gale (...) suffices to defeat the moral permission established by the original argument. (shrink)