Collection
Philosophy of Medicine – Unifying perspectives
The aim of the Topical Collection (TC) is to bring together research in philosophy, logic, and history to discuss issues related to bio-medical sciences, from different perspectives.
A special interest is given to the clarification of the interconnection between the use of hypotheses, predictions, and methods of corroboration in bio-medical sciences. This task is of a peculiar importance, if we are willing to avoid confusion with respect to the status of conclusions drawn in the course of a diagnosis, a research program, or with respect to political decision makings, among other.
For example, the distinction between hypotheses, predictions, and corroborations, can be related to a distinction usually drawn between abductive, deductive, and inductive inferences, respectively. Any proposal relative to the connection between them in medical practice is welcome. The TC is also concerned with medical research. For example, in philosophy and epistemology of medicine, it is fundamental to understand the meaning of causal claims. Indeed, how could we plan a public health policy to prevent certain forms of cancer, for example, if we do not know their causes? Given that causal links cannot be directly and empirically observed, how can they be established? Evidence-based medicine and randomized control trials, based on probabilistic and statistical methods, are commonly and efficiently invoked to provide responses to this problem. Nonetheless, lots of aspects of the causal links cannot be explained solely by such approaches. Mechanistic descriptions of how the measured variables can be linked are necessary to propose a more comprehensive view. How are defined such mechanisms? When and how are we confronted with hypotheses, confirmation, consequences of a theory? How are these steps connected in a wider medical practice?
The originality of the proposals will be evaluated with respect to their contribution to the clarification of the interconnection of issues (non-exhaustively) listed below:
Diagnosis,
Prognosis,
Therapy-planning and monitoring,
Hypotheses,
Corroboration, confirmation,
Risk evaluation,
Causality,
Mechanism,
Evidence-based medicine,
Randomized control trials,
Inference and Medical reasoning,
These issues can be approached from the perspective of logic, philosophy of sciences, epistemology, history of sciences, and ethics of medicine.
Editors
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Cristina Barés-Gómez
Cristina Barés-Gómez is Associate Professor at the U. Seville, Spain. She has a Ph.D in Philosophy from the U. Seville and the CSIC. She has carried out research stays at the ILLC (U. Amsterdam, Holland), STL (U. Lille 3, France), CFCUL (U. Lisbon, Portugal), IIF-UNAM (Mexico) and TUT ( U. Tallinn Estonia). Her research focuses on the use of knowledge and belief of real agents with formal tools (epistemic and dialogical logic). She studies how they are expressed in natural languages. She also focuses on abduction as an inference in scientific reasoning, specifically
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Matthieu Fontaine
Matthieu Fontaineis Assistant Professor at the U of Seville, Spain. He has been Assistant Professor at the U. of Salamanca (Spain), and researcher in many institutes in Lisbon, Mexico, ect. His research focuses on philosophy of logic (dialogical logic, intensional logics), philosophy of sciences (abduction, hypotheses, philosophy of medicine), and philosophy of language. He is also co-editor with Sh. Rahman and N. Clerbout of the collection “Dialogues and Games of Logic” (College Publications).
