Philosopher of medicine, AI, evidence and ethicshttps://cjblunt.com/https://cjblunt.com/new-website/https://cjblunt.com/new-website/After twelve years on WordPress, this site has a new look, a faster home and a fresh start for the WritePhilosophy guides.Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/evidence-pyramids/https://cjblunt.com/evidence-pyramids/[This paper has been updated in 2026 from the 2022 preprint] Evidence pyramids are amongst the most recognisable artefacts of the Evidence-Based Medicine movement. Yet no study has established the origins of evidence pyramids, or analysed whether they offer any information beyond simple lists or tables. In this paper, I establish the origins of the first evidence pyramid and argue that the pyramidal turn is a retrograde step in evidence appraisal.Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:12:19 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/cultural-bias-in-language-models/https://cjblunt.com/cultural-bias-in-language-models/How can AI-generated "Top 10" lists of cultural influencers expose the cultural biases and defaults that are built into our most popular language models? I propose and report an initial test using lists of the Top 10 most influential musicians.Fri, 17 Oct 2025 08:17:13 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/golem-ai-the-experimenters-regress-and-ai-decision-systems/https://cjblunt.com/golem-ai-the-experimenters-regress-and-ai-decision-systems/How can the concept of the experimenter's regress help us understand the problems in AI decision systems? I explore two forms of circularity that can underpin AI decision tools through the lens of Collins and Pinch's 'The Golem'.Mon, 06 Oct 2025 13:49:33 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/notebooklm-cast-with-care/https://cjblunt.com/notebooklm-cast-with-care/Google's NotebookLM "deep dive" feature is taking off in popularity. I subject three of my academic papers to the deep dive treatment, and reveal its tendency to subvert content for a happier ending.Sat, 05 Oct 2024 16:01:40 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/new-publication-grading-evidence-from-qualitative-research/https://cjblunt.com/new-publication-grading-evidence-from-qualitative-research/Announcing a new paper co-written with a EULAR working group, reporting the findings of a systematic review of qualitative evidence appraisal tools.Mon, 17 Jun 2024 13:13:16 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/four-myths-about-generative-ai-in-education/https://cjblunt.com/four-myths-about-generative-ai-in-education/I outline four common misconceptions about the use of Generative AI which are widespread in Higher Education debates about the use of these tools: that it is possible and practical to detect the use of AI in writing, that text produced by GenAI is bland, repetitive or predictable, that GenAI tools struggle to cite sources accurately, and that more creative or reflective assessments are harder to complete using AI.Tue, 26 Mar 2024 17:09:14 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/cryptic-ai/https://cjblunt.com/cryptic-ai/As language models are fine-tuned to acquire more capabilities, we continue to seek new tasks to push the limits of Generative AI. In setting cryptic crossword clues, so far GPT-4 fails the test quite spectacularly.Mon, 05 Feb 2024 17:34:17 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-ai-skills-of-social-scientists/https://cjblunt.com/the-ai-skills-of-social-scientists/What skills do social scientists need to adapt to generative AI, and how should educators approach teaching them? A narrow focus on training everyone in technical skills is misguided - what's needed is authorial voice, leadership and management skills, and the critical force of the social sciences.Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:13:18 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/leary-philosophers/https://cjblunt.com/leary-philosophers/Can a language model outperform old Edward Lear in describing philosophers in Limerick form? "There once was a Scotsman named Hume..."Tue, 09 May 2023 15:15:46 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/i-did-write-that-text/https://cjblunt.com/i-did-write-that-text/Will large language models acknowledge authorship of their own generated texts? Will a language model claim authorship or ownership of texts which it did not create? A mistaken comprehension of ChatGPT's abilities throws up a distinctive problem of intellectual property rights.Thu, 27 Apr 2023 09:22:33 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/perplexity-creativity-and-the-zonkamoozle/https://cjblunt.com/perplexity-creativity-and-the-zonkamoozle/What is the relationship between perplexity, creativity and novelty? Following on from 'Perplexing Perplexity', I set out to demonstrate that high perplexity texts are not always creative, and to showcase ChatGPT's ability to work with and even generate novel words - culminating in the Tale of Zonkamoozle.Wed, 22 Mar 2023 14:45:15 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/perplexing-perplexity/https://cjblunt.com/perplexing-perplexity/Detectors such as GPTZero use the property of 'perplexity' to try to detect AI authorship of texts. But I show that by writing in a specifically dull style, or engineering the prompt given to a language model, we can easily and systematically fool such detectors to label AI text as human and vice versa.Mon, 06 Mar 2023 14:15:15 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/machine-evidence-ii-the-abstract-setting/https://cjblunt.com/machine-evidence-ii-the-abstract-setting/A recent study by Gao et al. (2022) validates the warning of 'Machine Evidence' (Blunt, 2019) that language models would soon become capable of beating detection attempts by human peer reviewers. This piece looks at the near-term steps that journal editors and conference organisers can take to prevent AI-generated abstracts bypassing their screening processes, along with a warning for the long-term viability of those strategies.Mon, 16 Jan 2023 16:49:52 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-pyramid-schema/https://cjblunt.com/the-pyramid-schema/Evidence pyramids are amongst the most recognisable artefacts of the Evidence-Based Medicine movement. Yet no study has established the origins of evidence pyramids, or analysed whether they offer any information beyond simple lists or tables. In this paper, I establish the origins of the first evidence pyramid and argue that the pyramidal turn is a retrograde step in evidence appraisal.Wed, 07 Dec 2022 11:41:02 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/to-the-tune-of-pure-reason/https://cjblunt.com/to-the-tune-of-pure-reason/Can a new iteration of GPT-3 write pop songs, raps and limericks...about Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative? It is a moral duty to find out.Wed, 30 Nov 2022 08:46:10 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/league-table-ranking-and-name-recognition/https://cjblunt.com/league-table-ranking-and-name-recognition/Does the ranking of a UK university in league tables affect its reputation and name recognition? Using a novel data source from an online quiz, this research explores the complex relationship between league table rank and identifiability of universities.Tue, 01 Nov 2022 15:18:52 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-machine-scientists/https://cjblunt.com/the-machine-scientists/The Machine Scientists - Giovanni Borelli, Jan Swammerdam and Niels Steensen - followed Rene Descartes in modelling the human body mechanically. The scientific success of this 'iatrophysical' programme, replete with rejected entities such as 'Animal Spirits', poses a problem for Scientific Realism. Using Psillos' moderate realism, this paper attempts to reconcile a selective realist position with the historical record.Thu, 13 Oct 2022 20:18:43 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/modern-philosophers-by-dalle-2/https://cjblunt.com/modern-philosophers-by-dalle-2/Can DALL·E 2 create images of ancient philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Immanuel Kant as they'd look in modern day universities? Sort of. Should it? Definitely not.Tue, 11 Oct 2022 21:38:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/bias-and-the-myth-of-the-objective-average/https://cjblunt.com/bias-and-the-myth-of-the-objective-average/Would you choose a black box AI surgeon with a 90% success rate over a human surgeon with 80% success? The answer exposes a fundamental and harmful assumption within dominant models of medical evidence.Mon, 05 Sep 2022 22:00:30 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/higher-orders-of-evidence/https://cjblunt.com/higher-orders-of-evidence/DALLE 2 offers a far more powerful image generation AI than the popular open access 'Craiyon'/'DALLE Mini' model. How does DALLE 2 compare to DALLE Mini's visions of hierarchies and pyramids of evidence?Mon, 05 Sep 2022 21:24:08 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/visions-of-evidence/https://cjblunt.com/visions-of-evidence/How does a machine learning algorithm picture hierarchies of evidence and evidence-based medicine - and what do these visions of evidence remind us of the way we understand, order and assemble the information we use to guide clinical practice?Wed, 15 Jun 2022 11:00:13 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-origins-of-evidence-pyramids/https://cjblunt.com/the-origins-of-evidence-pyramids/What was the first evidence pyramid? A deep dive into the murky history of this novel way to present an evidence hierarchy reveals a significantly earlier origin that previously presumed.Tue, 15 Feb 2022 12:25:21 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/lumping-and-splitting-brain-tumours-in-white-britons/https://cjblunt.com/lumping-and-splitting-brain-tumours-in-white-britons/A much-publicised report suggests that white Britons' brain tumour survival rates are lower than other ethnicities. But analysing the ethnicities categories used, and considering the diversity of the "brain tumour" label, complicates the picture, as the 'Dismal Disease' of Glioblastoma continues to confound.Wed, 10 Nov 2021 10:58:32 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-jurassic-critique/https://cjblunt.com/the-jurassic-critique/AI21 Labs have just released a public demo of their giant language model, Jurassic-1. At 178bn parameters, it rivals GPT-3. Feeding it my own work, it generated some interesting and potentially novel views on evidence hierarchies... and then attributed them to CAM researcher Marc Micozzi! Is Jurassic Micozzi's critique of evidential pluralism in medicine sound?Wed, 22 Sep 2021 18:24:41 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/on-the-global-summit/https://cjblunt.com/on-the-global-summit/The Global Summit systematic review claims that spinal manipulation therapy is not effective in preventing any non-musculoskeletal disorders. But a breakaway group has challenged their findings, in part based on my arguments regarding evidence hierarchies. Are they correct? Does my critique undermine the Global Summit review? If so, does the evidence base favour chiropractic?Fri, 23 Apr 2021 09:43:44 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/imitating-imitation/https://cjblunt.com/imitating-imitation/In their 2020 paper, Floridi and Chiriatti subject giant language model GPT-3 to three tests: mathematical, semantic and ethical. I show that these tests are misconfigured to prove the points Floridi and Chiriatti are trying to make. We should attend to how such giant language models function to understand both their responses to questions and the ethical and societal impacts.Thu, 22 Apr 2021 11:05:57 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/minding-the-gaps-statistical-misrepresentation-in-attainment-gap-research/https://cjblunt.com/minding-the-gaps-statistical-misrepresentation-in-attainment-gap-research/Political interests configure the stories we tell with data. Closing the gap in attainment between disadvantaged students and their advantaged contemporaries is pivotal to an agenda to use education as a positive social force. But both the measurement and representation of this gap is politicised, skewed and open to manipulation. This paper shows how two organisations with inverse aims represent—and misrepresent—their measure of the attainment gap to portray diametric trajectories in the pursuit of equal attainment.Mon, 22 Mar 2021 17:19:01 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/conversion-therapy/https://cjblunt.com/conversion-therapy/Pressure mounts upon equalities minister Kemi Badenoch to resign over the UK government's failure to ban conversion therapies. Attention has focused on the government's failure to publish research commissioned in 2018. But evidence about whether conversion therapy works is irrelevant: conversion therapy is not a medical intervention.Fri, 12 Mar 2021 08:40:30 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-stochastic-masquerade/https://cjblunt.com/the-stochastic-masquerade/What does Google have in common with Barbra Streisand? Since Google fired AI ethicists Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru, our attention should turn to what they don't want us to read: "On Stochastic Parrots". Will the attempts to suppress this paper lead to it being overlooked, or will Google face Barbra Streisand's fate?Mon, 08 Mar 2021 07:00:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/a-new-writephilosophy-com/https://cjblunt.com/a-new-writephilosophy-com/A new version of WritePhilosophy.com is launching today. WritePhilosophy is a resource for students and teachers of philosophy, built on guides, articles and quizzes which help to immerse students in the concepts, language and principles of philosophical writing.Thu, 04 Mar 2021 14:41:36 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-true-causal-effect/https://cjblunt.com/the-true-causal-effect/Philosophy of medicine helps medical scientists to clarify their thinking. A maladept phrase like 'the true causal effect' serves to show why we need it.Tue, 09 Feb 2021 15:04:22 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/195-hierarchies/https://cjblunt.com/195-hierarchies/The database of evidence hierarchies has been updated based on a new systematic review of the medical literature, and now contains over 195 hierarchies.Fri, 09 Oct 2020 10:53:25 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/causal-relevance/https://cjblunt.com/causal-relevance/This series of philosophical papers unpacks six philosophical issues in diagnostics and develops a pluralistic model of diagnosis. This paper analyses the role of causal relevance in diagnostics. Are diagnoses defined by their causal relevance to symptoms?Wed, 30 Sep 2020 11:10:55 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/5-years-hierarchies-of-evidence/https://cjblunt.com/5-years-hierarchies-of-evidence/In the five years since the publication of Hierarchies of Evidence in Evidence-Based Medicine, what has changed and what lessons can philosophers learn?Tue, 29 Sep 2020 07:21:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/pathognomy-sine-qua-non/https://cjblunt.com/pathognomy-sine-qua-non/This series of philosophical papers unpacks six philosophical issues in diagnostics and develops a pluralistic model of diagnosis. This paper presents a set of minimal constraints which any theory of diagnostics must satisfy based on pathognomy and sine qua non relationships.Fri, 18 Sep 2020 16:43:50 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/socrates-in-the-dungeon/https://cjblunt.com/socrates-in-the-dungeon/What happens when you ask a machine learning language model tuned to create a D&D style adventure to instead produce a Socratic dialogue?Wed, 22 Jul 2020 12:28:46 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/automatic-gadfly/https://cjblunt.com/automatic-gadfly/I was inspired to see if AI language model GPT-2 could create some thought-provoking - or just weird - new Socratic dialogues.Tue, 14 Jul 2020 11:14:59 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/problems-of-diagnosis/https://cjblunt.com/problems-of-diagnosis/This series of philosophical papers unpacks six philosophical issues in diagnostics and develops a pluralistic model of diagnosis. This introductory paper outlines the six roles of diagnostics and distinguishes and relates the six problems of diagnosis.Fri, 03 Jul 2020 10:21:38 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/are-hierarchies-history/https://cjblunt.com/are-hierarchies-history/Even if the hierarchies of evidence are on their way out in EBM in theory, they could still be enjoying the spotlight in practice.Sat, 20 Jun 2020 11:18:43 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/dual-use-technology-and-gpt-3/https://cjblunt.com/dual-use-technology-and-gpt-3/Yesterday, AI researchers published a new paper entitled Language Models are Few-Shot Learners. This paper introduces GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3), the follow-up to last year's GPT-2, which at the time it was released was the largest language model out there....Fri, 29 May 2020 11:12:13 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/random-reflections/https://cjblunt.com/random-reflections/In 1972, Archie Cochrane publishedEffectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services. In a little under 86 pages, Cochrane offers a wide-ranged but succinct delivery of his experience and his philosophy of evidence in clinical practice. It's a fascinating...Fri, 22 May 2020 10:09:55 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/aphorisms-from-the-automatic-philosopher/https://cjblunt.com/aphorisms-from-the-automatic-philosopher/GPT-2 is a large language model capable of generating some of the most convincingly human-like text we are yet to see from artificial intelligence. Previously, I've used GPT-2 to generate reports of clinical trials and several paragraphs of an essay on irrationality in which...Tue, 05 May 2020 12:17:15 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/automatic-philosophising/https://cjblunt.com/automatic-philosophising/The following philosophical musings were generated by a machine learning language model called GPT-2. They were created by a very weak version of GPT-2 which was released to the public in May 2019. The full version has nearly 5 times as many nodes and produces much more...Thu, 02 Apr 2020 09:14:37 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/crisis-thresholds-network-demarcation-and-the-kuhnian-turning-point/https://cjblunt.com/crisis-thresholds-network-demarcation-and-the-kuhnian-turning-point/In at least some of his work (e.g. 1962), Kuhn refers to a ‘crisis’ within the scientific community, which occurs when the build-up of anomalies becomes so substantial that most of the community begin to search for an alternative to the dominant paradigm. The crisis...Tue, 10 Mar 2020 11:57:04 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/a-ghost-of-progress-how-hierarchies-become-fixtures/https://cjblunt.com/a-ghost-of-progress-how-hierarchies-become-fixtures/I have written extensively on hierarchies of evidence in evidence-based medicine. The origin story of hierarchies of evidence is a little contentious. Several sources in EBM cite Campbell and Stanley's 1963 classic "Experimental and Quasi-experimental Designs for Research" as...Wed, 20 Nov 2019 11:00:19 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-dismal-disease/https://cjblunt.com/the-dismal-disease/Evidence interacts. To understand the evidence base for an intervention we must look not only at individual studies, but the relationships between them.Wed, 28 Aug 2019 12:50:56 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/all-that-glitters-is-not-evidence/https://cjblunt.com/all-that-glitters-is-not-evidence/Recently, I wrote about a new machine learning model called GPT-2 which was conspicuously not released by OpenAI. GPT-2 is a massive language model which can be used to generate often highly convincing text when given a prompt. Using the 'attention' framework, the language...Mon, 29 Jul 2019 14:44:45 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/machine-evidence-trial-by-ai/https://cjblunt.com/machine-evidence-trial-by-ai/Take a look at the following snippets from descriptions of clinical trials, thinking about how you'd rate the quality and strength of the evidence that comes from each:Thu, 13 Jun 2019 08:26:07 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/stop-fighting-youre-making-me-sad/https://cjblunt.com/stop-fighting-youre-making-me-sad/Does medical science have to be adversarial to make progress? Does progress in patient care consist of weeding out treatments which are ineffective and replacing existing therapies with new and better alternatives?Mon, 08 Apr 2019 12:35:45 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/echoes-of-evidence/https://cjblunt.com/echoes-of-evidence/Do you have an idea of what makes good medical evidence in your mind? Do you have ideas about the kind of evidence you’d pay attention to, and the kind of evidence you can safely disregard? Or ideas about the evidence that would strongly sway your beliefs and actions, and the...Thu, 21 Mar 2019 13:40:50 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-authority-of-evidence-based-medicine/https://cjblunt.com/the-authority-of-evidence-based-medicine/In the early part of the 20th century, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein sought to demonstrate that metaphysical claims are meaningless. Statements which couldn’t be proven true in some way—through logic or evidence—weren’t even false, they had no meaning at all. But he ran...Thu, 07 Feb 2019 15:00:23 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-positivity-machine-evidence-based-alternative-medicine-and-grades-of-recommendation/https://cjblunt.com/the-positivity-machine-evidence-based-alternative-medicine-and-grades-of-recommendation/In his beat-poem Storm, the musician and comedian Tim Minchin lays out an apparent paradox. By his criteria, there can never be evidence-based alternative medicine. As soon as there’s evidence that a treatment works, it joins scientific medicine. Minchin goes on to list...Thu, 31 Jan 2019 18:25:04 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-parachute-problem-extracorporeal-life-support-and-the-demand-for-trials/https://cjblunt.com/the-parachute-problem-extracorporeal-life-support-and-the-demand-for-trials/The United States Parachute Association recorded 120 deaths while skydiving in America in 2008-2015. Most were due to human error, while others resulted from collisions with other parachutes or aircraft. Only 5 were due to equipment failure. With around 3 million parachute...Thu, 26 Jul 2018 21:33:13 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/medicine-needs-diverse-evidence/https://cjblunt.com/medicine-needs-diverse-evidence/Do not centralize evidence. If you believe that all the evidence you need to make your decisions is of a single kind, you will be so much easier to mislead. Those who say 'I’ll believe it when I see this kind of study’, once their singular preference is declared, are so much...Tue, 05 Jun 2018 12:32:52 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/two-reactions-to-philosophy-in-medicine/https://cjblunt.com/two-reactions-to-philosophy-in-medicine/I spend a lot of my time talking to healthcare practitioners of all kinds about evidence, formally and informally. I'm mostly focused on getting the word out that RCT results are not the only thing that matters in treatment recommendations, that hierarchies of evidence are...Thu, 03 May 2018 10:49:04 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-avoidable-scandal-benoxaprofen-and-theories-of-medical-evidence/https://cjblunt.com/the-avoidable-scandal-benoxaprofen-and-theories-of-medical-evidence/Benoxaprofen, marketed as Opren in the UK, created a scandal in 1982 when it was withdrawn from sale amidst reports of over 60 deaths and thousands of adverse reactions. The question of who was at fault for this disaster has been addressed many times in the academic...Thu, 15 Mar 2018 22:19:36 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/ubl-and-variation/https://cjblunt.com/ubl-and-variation/I've argued that information about variation in treatment effects is vital for doctors, patients and regulators alike. This information does not come from RCTs. Nonetheless, we can acquire high-quality, compelling evidence of variation. The case studies I've presented in the...Wed, 31 Jan 2018 09:30:51 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/failures-of-diagnosis/https://cjblunt.com/failures-of-diagnosis/Of late, a confusion has emerged in the diagnostic and philosophical literature concerning the ways in which diagnostic failure can occur. It's rare to see clear attempts at a taxonomy of diagnostic failure. Here, I want to disambiguate a number of ways in which clinicians...Mon, 08 Jan 2018 21:36:24 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/pluralism-and-the-problems-of-demarcation/https://cjblunt.com/pluralism-and-the-problems-of-demarcation/In 1983, Larry Laudan proclaimed the “Demise of the Demarcation Problem” (Laudan 1983). I will argue that the ‘simple demarcation’ problem should indeed be abandoned. However, abandoning the quest for simple demarcation does not entail that demarcation problems are...Tue, 17 Jan 2017 11:18:09 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/hierarchies-of-evidence-database-of-hierarchies/https://cjblunt.com/hierarchies-of-evidence-database-of-hierarchies/Hierarchies of Evidence are a tool employed by many advocates of Evidence-Based Medicine. They are used to appraise evidence from a range of sources, as well as to teach medical students about evidence and evidence appraisal. My PhD thesis concerns the variation in hierarchies defended, and the range of philosophical interpretations of those hierarchies.Wed, 29 Jun 2016 14:36:49 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/against-effective-treatments/https://cjblunt.com/against-effective-treatments/I am agitating for philosophers of medicine and philosophically-minded clinicians to lead the charge against the term “effective treatment”. This phrase has become ubiquitous in the medical and philosophical literature. But it is a misguided choice which misleads the public...Fri, 29 Apr 2016 11:57:46 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/an-information-ordering-thing/https://cjblunt.com/an-information-ordering-thing/Randall Monroe of xkcdstarted writing explanations of complex physical phenomena using only the most common 1,000 English words (or the most common 'ten hundred', as he'd have to put it). He recently released a straightforward application which allows writers to check which...Thu, 17 Dec 2015 08:25:27 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-exhaustiveness-problem/https://cjblunt.com/the-exhaustiveness-problem/Hierarchies of evidence can be classified as exhaustive or inexhaustive. A hierarchy is exhaustive if and only if it gives some ranking to any given piece of medical evidence - there's nothing it leaves out. But there's a dilemma which hierarchy authors face: either way,...Thu, 15 Oct 2015 20:43:28 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/two-dogmas-of-evidence-hierarchies/https://cjblunt.com/two-dogmas-of-evidence-hierarchies/Hierarchies of evidence in Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) come in many varieties and have been very influential in medical practice and policy since the late 1990s. However, two fundamental problematic assumptions underpin the use of hierarchies of any kind in clinical...Sun, 01 Feb 2015 09:17:59 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/philosophical-arguments/https://cjblunt.com/philosophical-arguments/A philosophy paper consists of an argument for a thesis. The quality of your paper will be judged primarily on how well your argument supports your thesis. But what is a thesis? How specific should it be? How do we construct arguments, breaking them down into a series of premises and a conclusion? What makes an argument persuasive?Wed, 17 Sep 2014 12:35:55 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/validity-and-soundness/https://cjblunt.com/validity-and-soundness/We laid out two criteria for a persuasive argument: that the conclusion follows from the premises, and that the premises are all true. But what does it mean for a conclusion to "follow from" the premises? In deductive inference, we want to know whether an argument is valid and whether it is sound. What do these terms mean and how are they used?Wed, 17 Sep 2014 11:30:11 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/abstracts-and-introductions/https://cjblunt.com/abstracts-and-introductions/Where to start? Writing an introduction or abstract for your philosophy paper can be daunting - and with good reason. The first paragraph of your paper is also the most important. But how do you write a good introduction? What should you include and what must you leave out? And how can writing an introduction help you to structure your paper?Wed, 17 Sep 2014 10:44:43 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/reading-effectively/https://cjblunt.com/reading-effectively/It sounds odd to say that you don’t know how to read academic papers. You start at the beginning, keep reading until the end—right? But the problem of being unable to cope with academic reading is probably the most common complaint amongst students at all levels. The truth is that reading for academic purposes is just not the same as other kinds of reading. You have to read actively, selectively and purposefully.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 10:05:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/analysing-an-argument/https://cjblunt.com/analysing-an-argument/How can we read complex papers to extract the philosophical argument? What is the Principle of Charity? Reading philosophical texts can be challenging. Extracting the thesis and rendering the argument into premises-and-conclusion form is a great way to understanding the author's reasoning.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 10:00:46 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/structure/https://cjblunt.com/structure/"Poorly structured" and "unstructured" are very common criticisms in feedback on essays. But what does that mean, and how should you respond? Not all structures are created equal. This guide reviews six common essay structures to help you create a stronger structure for your paper.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 10:00:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/using-literature/https://cjblunt.com/using-literature/How many sources should a philosophy paper use? How do you cite these works and avoid accusations of plagiarism? How do you present other philosophers' ideas and arguments in your paper? Should you include quotations? These are very common questions which students face. Let's look at the ways you should and should not use literature in your essays.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:57:30 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/conceptual-analysis/https://cjblunt.com/conceptual-analysis/Philosophers perform conceptual analysis to understanding the meaning of terms from 'death' to 'love', 'good' to 'evil' and 'science' to 'art'. How do we evaluate conceptual analyses? What are necessary and sufficient conditions? What makes a conceptual analysis too strong or too weak?Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:56:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/distinctions/https://cjblunt.com/distinctions/Philosophers often draw distinctions, dividing things into categories. How do we evaluate distinctions? What is a 'proper distinction'? What makes a distinction exhaustive or mutually exclusive? And what does this have to do with suckling pigs and mermaids?Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:56:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/reductio-and-dilemmas/https://cjblunt.com/reductio-and-dilemmas/Two powerful ways of criticising a philosophical position, reductio ad absurdum and dilemmas, and how to respond when they are used against your own view.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:55:48 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/counterexamples-writephilosophy-guide/https://cjblunt.com/counterexamples-writephilosophy-guide/Some of the most powerful philosophical criticisms provide a counterexample to a claim. But how do we formulate counterexamples? And if there is a counterexample to a claim you want to defend or an argument you want to make, how should you proceed? We'll look at Gettier's famous counterexamples to find out.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:55:36 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/fallacies/https://cjblunt.com/fallacies/A fallacy is a mistake or error in reasoning. Fallacies can be accidental errors, or can be deliberately crafted to be misleading. Many different types of fallacy have been described across many fields. Understanding fallacies is useful for philosophers to identify fallacious reasoning in arguments which we are criticising, and to avoid committing them in our own work.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:30:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/formalising-arguments/https://cjblunt.com/formalising-arguments/Formalising arguments allows us to look at the underlying logical form of the premises and conclusions. We can use this tool to determine the validity of the argument. How do we find the logical form of a proposition? This guide introduces the basics of propositional logic.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:28:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/truth-tables/https://cjblunt.com/truth-tables/Truth Tables are a useful tool for analysing propositions and arguments alike. They allow us to give precise definitions for our logical connectives. They also allow us to show systematically that a proposition is a tautology or contradiction, and to prove that an argument is valid or invalid. How do we create truth tables?Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:27:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/logical-equivalence/https://cjblunt.com/logical-equivalence/What does it mean for two propositions to be logically equivalent? When can we swap out a proposition for another? Using the method of Truth Tables, we can formalise a way to discover whether two propositions are logically equivalent, and deploy this method to transform our claims into the most useful form to deploy them in arguments.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:26:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/editing/https://cjblunt.com/editing/How do we draft, edit and proofread philosophical papers to ensure that what we're turning in is high-quality? What's the difference between a Zero Draft, a First Draft and a Final Draft? This guide article gives you a range of tools, tests and techniques to improve your paper immeasurably through editing and proofreading.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:15:04 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/banned-words/https://cjblunt.com/banned-words/You can improve your philosophical writing by removing certain words and phrases. Some phrases weaken your papers by introducing vagueness and ambiguity, by wasting words, or by acting as a crutch to prevent you saying what you really need to say. Here we've compiled a list of "banned" words and phrases. By banning yourself from using these, you can improve your philosophical style.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 09:00:20 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/areas-of-philosophy-writephilosophy-quiz/https://cjblunt.com/areas-of-philosophy-writephilosophy-quiz/Can you tell epistemology from metaphysics? Aesthetics from ethics? We have created this quiz to test your understanding of the terms for different fields or areas of philosophy.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:30:54 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/fallacies-quiz-writephilosophy-quiz/https://cjblunt.com/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.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:15:19 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/paradoxes-quiz/https://cjblunt.com/paradoxes-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.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:00:46 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/logical-validity-quiz/https://cjblunt.com/logical-validity-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.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:00:29 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/logic-basic-propositions/https://cjblunt.com/logic-basic-propositions/Test your skills at formalising arguments by trying your hand at this quiz. Can you identify which sentences have which basic propositional forms?Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:00:24 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/logic-compound-propositions-writephilosophy-quiz/https://cjblunt.com/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.Wed, 17 Sep 2014 06:58:51 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/an-honest-mess/https://cjblunt.com/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...Wed, 19 Feb 2014 11:51:12 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/festive-fallacies/https://cjblunt.com/festive-fallacies/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!Wed, 25 Dec 2013 09:00:00 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/strength-of-recommendation-the-rudner-problem/https://cjblunt.com/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...Mon, 22 Jul 2013 08:30:33 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/ps-in-a-pod-definitions-in-circles/https://cjblunt.com/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...Mon, 06 May 2013 10:39:43 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/the-disunity-of-evidence-based-medicine/https://cjblunt.com/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...Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:00:31 GMThttps://cjblunt.com/rcts-a-note-on-terminology/https://cjblunt.com/rcts-a-note-on-terminology/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 can.Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:44:26 GMT