Varieties Of Causal Explanation In Medical Contexts

Author : Raffaella Campaner
Publisher : Udine/Gorizia Conference Proce
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2020-04
Category : Medical
ISBN : 8869772780

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Varieties of Causal Explanation in Medical Contexts by Raffaella Campaner Pdf

Far from being the sole mode of explaining, explanation in terms of - mostly probabilistic - causes has nourished a wide debate addressing diseases, what produces them and how. Focusing on causal explanations involves, in turn, getting deeper into conceptions of causation, modelling, and control, and presents a range of relevant issues for research and clinical contexts. The aim of the volume is two-fold. In the first place, its purpose is to stress core features, differences and interactions between various theories belonging to, on the one hand, the mechanical and neo-mechanical approach to explanation, and, on the other hand, the interventionist approach, testing their suitability in medicine. In the second place, and related to the first, a form of pluralism is advocated which is grounded on a deep analysis of specific features of explanatory contexts in the health sciences, especially in cancer and mental health studies.

Author : Mervyn Susser
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 181 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 1977
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:256380825

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Causal Thinking in the Health Sciences by Mervyn Susser Pdf

Author : Lucien Karhausen
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2023-10-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783031416330

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The Fragility of Philosophy of Medicine by Lucien Karhausen Pdf

This book about philosophy of medicine bestows a bottom-up and not a top-down approach. It starts from clinical medicine and epidemiology, analyzing their interrelations with philosophical instruments. The book criticizes the constant search for generalities and the essentialism that too often characterizes this discipline, which results in philosophers of medicine dialoguing with each other without direct contact with medical science. In the light of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy, this book proposes an approach to the philosophy of medicine based on the quorum of language, what Wittgenstein calls family resemblances. In this way the author establishes a philosophy of medicine that is closely related to the medical clinic and to public health and as such avoids armchair philosophy. “Don’t think, but look", wrote Wittgenstein.

Author : Rani Lill Anjum,Samantha Copeland,Elena Rocca
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2020-06-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783030412395

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Rethinking Causality, Complexity and Evidence for the Unique Patient by Rani Lill Anjum,Samantha Copeland,Elena Rocca Pdf

This open access book is a unique resource for health professionals who are interested in understanding the philosophical foundations of their daily practice. It provides tools for untangling the motivations and rationality behind the way medicine and healthcare is studied, evaluated and practiced. In particular, it illustrates the impact that thinking about causation, complexity and evidence has on the clinical encounter. The book shows how medicine is grounded in philosophical assumptions that could at least be challenged. By engaging with ideas that have shaped the medical profession, clinicians are empowered to actively take part in setting the premises for their own practice and knowledge development. Written in an engaging and accessible style, with contributions from experienced clinicians, this book presents a new philosophical framework that takes causal complexity, individual variation and medical uniqueness as default expectations for health and illness.

Author : Lorenzo Magnani
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 1921 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2023-03-31
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9783031101359

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Handbook of Abductive Cognition by Lorenzo Magnani Pdf

This Handbook offers the first comprehensive reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of abductive cognition, providing readers with extensive information on the process of reasoning to hypotheses in humans, animals, and in computational machines. It highlights the role of abduction in both theory practice: in generating and testing hypotheses and explanatory functions for various purposes and as an educational device. It merges logical, cognitive, epistemological and philosophical perspectives with more practical needs relating to the application of abduction across various disciplines and practices, such as in diagnosis, creative reasoning, scientific discovery, diagrammatic and ignorance-based cognition, and adversarial strategies. It also discusses the inferential role of models in hypothetical reasoning, abduction and creativity, including the process of development, implementation and manipulation for different scientific and technological purposes. Written by a group of internationally renowned experts in philosophy, logic, general epistemology, mathematics, cognitive, and computer science, as well as life sciences, engineering, architecture, and economics, the Handbook of Abductive Cognition offers a unique reference guide for readers approaching the process of reasoning to hypotheses from different perspectives and for various theoretical and practical purposes. Numerous diagrams, schemes and other visual representations are included to promote a better understanding of the relevant concepts and to make concepts highly accessible to an audience of scholars and students with different scientific backgrounds.

Author : James Woodward
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 419 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2005-10-27
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780198035336

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Making Things Happen by James Woodward Pdf

In Making Things Happen, James Woodward develops a new and ambitious comprehensive theory of causation and explanation that draws on literature from a variety of disciplines and which applies to a wide variety of claims in science and everyday life. His theory is a manipulationist account, proposing that causal and explanatory relationships are relationships that are potentially exploitable for purposes of manipulation and control. This account has its roots in the commonsense idea that causes are means for bringing about effects; but it also draws on a long tradition of work in experimental design, econometrics, and statistics. Woodward shows how these ideas may be generalized to other areas of science from the social scientific and biomedical contexts for which they were originally designed. He also provides philosophical foundations for the manipulationist approach, drawing out its implications, comparing it with alternative approaches, and defending it from common criticisms. In doing so, he shows how the manipulationist account both illuminates important features of successful causal explanation in the natural and social sciences, and avoids the counterexamples and difficulties that infect alternative approaches, from the deductive-nomological model onwards. Making Things Happen will interest philosophers working in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of social science, and metaphysics, and as well as anyone interested in causation, explanation, and scientific methodology.

Author : Joseph Y. Halpern
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2019-02-19
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262537131

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Actual Causality by Joseph Y. Halpern Pdf

A new approach for defining causality and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degrees of blame, and causal explanation. Causality plays a central role in the way people structure the world; we constantly seek causal explanations for our observations. But what does it even mean that an event C “actually caused” event E? The problem of defining actual causation goes beyond mere philosophical speculation. For example, in many legal arguments, it is precisely what needs to be established in order to determine responsibility. The philosophy literature has been struggling with the problem of defining causality since Hume. In this book, Joseph Halpern explores actual causality, and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. The goal is to arrive at a definition of causality that matches our natural language usage and is helpful, for example, to a jury deciding a legal case, a programmer looking for the line of code that cause some software to fail, or an economist trying to determine whether austerity caused a subsequent depression. Halpern applies and expands an approach to causality that he and Judea Pearl developed, based on structural equations. He carefully formulates a definition of causality, and building on this, defines degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. He concludes by discussing how these ideas can be applied to such practical problems as accountability and program verification. Technical details are generally confined to the final section of each chapter and can be skipped by non-mathematical readers.

Author : Anne Sophie Meincke
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2020-04-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9783030287221

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Dispositionalism by Anne Sophie Meincke Pdf

According to dispositional realism, or dispositionalism, the entities inhabiting our world possess irreducibly dispositional properties – often called ‘powers’ – by means of which they are sources of change. Dispositionalism has become increasingly popular among metaphysicians in the last three decades as it offers a realist account of causation and provides novel avenues for understanding modality, laws of nature, agency, free will and other key concepts in metaphysics. At the same time, it is receiving growing interest among philosophers of science. This reflects the substantial role scientific findings play in arguments for dispositionalism which, as a metaphysics of science, aims to unveil the very foundations of science. The present collection of essays brings together both strands of interest. It elucidates the ontological profile of dispositionalism by exploring its ontological commitments, and it discusses these from the perspective of the philosophy of science. The essays are written by both proponents of dispositionalism and sceptics so as to initiate an open-minded, constructive dialogue.

Author : Philip Kitcher,Wesley C. Salmon
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 546 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 1962-05-25
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780816657650

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Scientific Explanation by Philip Kitcher,Wesley C. Salmon Pdf

Scientific Explanation was first published in 1962. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Is a new consensus emerging in the philosophy of science? The nine distinguished contributors to this volume apply that question to the realm of scientific explanation and, although their conclusions vary, they agree in one respect: there definitely was an old consensus. Co-editor Wesley Salmon's opening essay, "Four Decades of Scientific Explanation," grounds the entire discussion. His point of departure is the founding document of the old consensus: a 1948 paper by Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, "Studies in the Logic of Explanation," that set forth, with remarkable clarity, a mode of argument that came to be known as the deductive-nomological model. This approach, holding that explanation dies not move beyond the sphere of empirical knowledge, remained dominant during the hegemony of logical empiricism from 1950 to 1975. Salmon traces in detail the rise and breakup of the old consensus, and examines the degree to which there is, if not a new consensus, at least a kind of reconciliation on this issue among contemporary philosophers of science and clear agreement that science can indeed tell us why. The other contributors, in the order of their presentations, are: Peter Railton, Matti Sintonen, Paul W. Humphreys, David Papineau, Nancy Cartwright, James Woodward, Merrilee H. Salmon, and Philip Kitcher.

Author : National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,Health and Medicine Division,Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice,Committee on Community-Based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the United States
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 583 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2017-04-27
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9780309452960

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Communities in Action by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,Health and Medicine Division,Board on Population Health and Public Health Practice,Committee on Community-Based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the United States Pdf

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Author : Derek Bolton,Grant Gillett
Publisher : Springer
Page : 149 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2019-03-28
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9783030118990

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The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease by Derek Bolton,Grant Gillett Pdf

This open access book is a systematic update of the philosophical and scientific foundations of the biopsychosocial model of health, disease and healthcare. First proposed by George Engel 40 years ago, the Biopsychosocial Model is much cited in healthcare settings worldwide, but has been increasingly criticised for being vague, lacking in content, and in need of reworking in the light of recent developments. The book confronts the rapid changes to psychological science, neuroscience, healthcare, and philosophy that have occurred since the model was first proposed and addresses key issues such as the model’s scientific basis, clinical utility, and philosophical coherence. The authors conceptualise biology and the psychosocial as in the same ontological space, interlinked by systems of communication-based regulatory control which constitute a new kind of causation. These are distinguished from physical and chemical laws, most clearly because they can break down, thus providing the basis for difference between health and disease. This work offers an urgent update to the model’s scientific and philosophical foundations, providing a new and coherent account of causal interactions between the biological, the psychological and social.

Author : Ph.D. Nordby
Publisher : CRC Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 1999-12-20
Category : Law
ISBN : 1420048821

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Dead Reckoning by Ph.D. Nordby Pdf

Her Brentwood home became a hotbed for homicide. But in the wake of intense public and media attention, one saliant and hard truth was often overlooked: the murder of Nicole Brown-Simpson, while brutal and heinous in its form, was just one of thousands of homicides committed during that same year. Most escaped the scrutiny of public interest. Many never made it to trial, and still others were dismissed as natural deaths-perfect crimes that remain forever unsolved. How, then, do investigators solve a murder when the trail goes cold? Like mariners navigating without landmarks under a starless night sky-lacking a reliable witness or smoking gun-they plot their course through the clues by applying their own style of Dead Reckoning, reconstructing the crime by disciplined observation, careful reasoning, and experience. Dead Reckoning: The Art of Forensic Detection examines the applications of logic and science to decipher chaotic death scenes and difficult cases, and to derive orderly explanations from their jumbled clues. The 10 case studies in this book illustrate the powers of observation exercised in reading the signs, identifying them as clues, and reasoning from them to the best explanation. For investigators, as well as forensic pathologists, coroners, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, Dead Reckoning: The Art of Forensic Detection stresses the importance of trusting your own observations even in the wake of contradictory evidence.

Author : Riccardo Viale
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2014-01-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783642402166

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Methodological Cognitivism by Riccardo Viale Pdf

This book covers a broad spectrum of topics, from experimental philosophy and cognitive theory of science, to social epistemology and research and innovation policy. Following up on the previously published Volume 1, “Mind, Rationality, and Society,” it provides further applications of methodological cognitivism in areas such as scientific discovery, technology transfer and innovation policy. It also analyzes the impact of cognitive science on philosophical problems like causality and truth. The book is divided into four parts: Part I “Experimental Philosophy and Causality” tackles the problem of causality, which is often seen as straddling metaphysics, ontology and epistemology. Part II “Cognitive Rationality of Science” deals with the cognitive foundation of scientific rationality, starting from a strong critique of the neopositivist rationality of science on the one hand and of the relativist and social reduction of the methodology of science on the other. Part III “Research Policy and Social Epistemology” deals with topics of social epistemology, science policy and culture of innovation. Lastly, Part IV “Knowledge Transfer and Innovation” addresses the dynamics of knowledge generation, transfer and use in technological innovation.

Author : Peter G. Smith,R. H. Morrow,Richard H. Morrow,David A. Ross
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 479 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9780198732860

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Field Trials of Health Interventions by Peter G. Smith,R. H. Morrow,Richard H. Morrow,David A. Ross Pdf

"IEA, International Epidemiological Association, Welcome Trust."

Author : L.Y Nordenfelt,B.I.B Lindahl
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9789400962835

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Health, Disease, and Causal Explanations in Medicine by L.Y Nordenfelt,B.I.B Lindahl Pdf

On May 13-15, 1982, some 50 scientists and scholars - physicians, philos ophers and social scientists - convened at Hasselby Castle in Stockholm for the first Nordic Symposium on the Philosophy of Medicine. The topics for the symposium included (1) the concepts of health and disease, (2) classification in medicine, and (3) causality and causal explanations in medicine. The majority of the participants were Scandinavian but the symposium was also able to welcome four distinguished guests from other parts of the world, Professors Stuart F. Spicker and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., U.S.A., Dr Anne M. Fagot, France, and Dr Werner Morbach, West Germany. The latter represented Professor Kazem Sadegh-zadeh, who unfortunately was prevented from attending. One of the main purposes of this symposium was to bring together people in Scandinavia who at present work within the field of Philosophy of Medi cine. This group is still relatively small but is growing rapidly, and the scholarly activity has recently been notable. This fact is clearly demonstrated by the presentation of 'Philosophy of Medicine in Scandinavia' in the Appendix of this volume.