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  1. Interpreting causality in the health sciences.Federica Russo & Jon Williamson - 2007 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21 (2):157 – 170.
    We argue that the health sciences make causal claims on the basis of evidence both of physical mechanisms, and of probabilistic dependencies. Consequently, an analysis of causality solely in terms of physical mechanisms or solely in terms of probabilistic relationships, does not do justice to the causal claims of these sciences. Yet there seems to be a single relation of cause in these sciences - pluralism about causality will not do either. Instead, we maintain, the health sciences require a theory (...)
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  • (1 other version)The shadows and shallows of explanation.Robert A. Wilson & Frank Keil - 1998 - Minds and Machines 8 (1):137-159.
    We introduce two notions–the shadows and the shallows of explanation–in opening up explanation to broader, interdisciplinary investigation. The shadows of explanation refer to past philosophical efforts to provide either a conceptual analysis of explanation or in some other way to pinpoint the essence of explanation. The shallows of explanation refer to the phenomenon of having surprisingly limited everyday, individual cognitive abilities when it comes to explanation. Explanations are ubiquitous, but they typically are not accompanied by the depth that we might, (...)
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  • Expanding the notion of mechanism to further understanding of biopsychosocial disorders? Depression and medically-unexplained pain as cases in point.Jan Pieter Konsman - 2024 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 103 (C):123-136.
    Evidence-Based Medicine has little consideration for mechanisms and philosophers of science and medicine have recently made pleas to increase the place of mechanisms in the medical evidence hierarchy. However, in this debate the notions of mechanisms seem to be limited to 'mechanistic processes' and 'complex-systems mechanisms,' understood as 'componential causal systems'. I believe that this will not do full justice to how mechanisms are used in biological, psychological and social sciences and, consequently, in a more biopsychosocial approach to medicine. Here, (...)
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  • History of Behavioral Neurology (2nd edition).Sergio Barberis & Cory Wright - 2022 - In Sergio Della Sala (ed.), Encyclopedia of Behavioral Neuroscience, Vol. 1. Elsevier. pp. 1–13.
    This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of behavioral neurology, dividing it roughly into six eras. In the ancient and classical eras, emphasis is placed on two transitions: firstly, from descriptions of head trauma and attempted neurosurgical treatments to the exploratory dissections during the Hellenistic period and the replacement of cardiocentrism; and secondly, to the more systematic investigations of Galenus and the rise of pneumatic ventricular theory. In the medieval through post-Renaissance eras, the scholastic consolidation of knowledge and (...)
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  • How causal are microbiomes? A comparison with the Helicobacter pylori explanation of ulcers.Kate E. Lynch, Emily C. Parke & Maureen A. O’Malley - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (6):62.
    Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...)
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  • Narrowing the Theory’s or Study’s Scope May Increase Practical Relevance.Mikko Siponen & Tuula Klaavuniemi - 1990 - In Mikko Siponen & Tuula Klaavuniemi (eds.), Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. pp. 6260-6269.
    Numerous articles in top IS journals note as a limitation and lack of generalizability that their findings are specific to a certain type of technology, culture, and so on. We argue that this generalizability concern is about limited scope. The IS literature notes this preference for generalizability as a characteristic of good science and it is sometimes confused with statistical generalizability. We argue that such generalizability can be in conflict with explanation or prediction accuracy. An increase in scope can decrease (...)
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  • Innovation Systems Approach: a Philosophical Appraisal.Arash Moussavi & Ali Kermanshah - 2018 - Philosophy of Management 17 (1):59-77.
    The innovation systems approach has swiftly spread out worldwide in the last three decades and stood as an important framework for policy-making in the fields of science, technology, and innovation. At the same time, there have been serious and untreated concerns in the literature about the theoretical soundness of this approach. Our discussion in this paper is based on the belief that a detailed analysis on epistemological foundations of the approach could shed a judgmental light on the aforementioned concerns. To (...)
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  • The power PC theory and causal powers: Comment on Cheng (1997) and Novick and Cheng (2004).Peter A. White - 2005 - Psychological Review 112 (3):675-682.
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  • The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation.Carl F. Craver - 2014 - In Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann (eds.), Explanation in the special science: The case of biology and history. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 27-52.
    According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...)
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  • Functions and mechanisms: a perspectivalist view.Carl F. Craver - 2013 - In Philippe Huneman (ed.), Functions: selection and mechanisms. Springer. pp. 133--158.
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  • The Concept of Mechanism in Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1):152-163.
    The concept of mechanism in biology has three distinct meanings. It may refer to a philosophical thesis about the nature of life and biology (‘mechanicism’), to the internal workings of a machine-like structure (‘machine mechanism’), or to the causal explanation of a particular phenomenon (‘causal mechanism’). In this paper I trace the conceptual evolution of ‘mechanism’ in the history of biology, and I examine how the three meanings of this term have come to be featured in the philosophy of biology, (...)
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  • Does hiv or poverty cause aids? Biomedical and epidemiological perspectives.Albert Mosley - 2004 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 25 (5-6):399-421.
    This paper contrasts biomedical and epidemiological approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of disease, and uses Collingwoods principle of the relativity of causes to show how different approaches focus on different causal factors reflecting different interests. By distinguishing between the etiology of a disease and an epidemic, the paper argues that, from an epidemiological perspective, poverty is an important causal factor in the African AIDS epidemic and that emphasizing this should not be considered incompatible with recognizing the causal necessity of (...)
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  • How causal are microbiomes? A comparison with the H elicobacter pylori explanation of ulcers.Kate E. Lynch, Emily C. Parke & Maureen A. O’Malley - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (6):62.
    Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...)
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  • Bewitchment, Biology, or Both: The Co‐Existence of Natural and Supernatural Explanatory Frameworks Across Development.Cristine H. Legare & Susan A. Gelman - 2008 - Cognitive Science 32 (4):607-642.
    Three studies examined the co‐existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission, from a developmental perspective. The participants (5‐, 7‐, 11‐, and 15‐year‐olds and adults; N = 366) were drawn from 2 Sesotho‐speaking South African communities, where Western biomedical and traditional healing frameworks were both available. Results indicated that, although biological explanations for illness were endorsed at high levels, witchcraft was also often endorsed. More important, bewitchment explanations were neither the result of ignorance nor replaced by biological (...)
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  • The Overlooked Role of Cases in Casual Attribution in Medicine.Rachel A. Ankeny - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):999-1011.
    Although cases are central to the epistemic practices utilized within clinical medicine, they appear to be limited in their ability to provide evidence about causal relations because they provide detailed accounts of particular patients without explicit filtering of those attributes most likely to be relevant for explaining the phenomena observed. This paper uses a series of recent case reports to explore the role of cases in casual attribution in medical diagnosis. It is argued that cases are brought together by practitioners (...)
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  • Epistemic causality and evidence-based medicine.Federica Russo & Jon Williamson - 2011 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 33 (4).
    Causal claims in biomedical contexts are ubiquitous albeit they are not always made explicit. This paper addresses the question of what causal claims mean in the context of disease. It is argued that in medical contexts causality ought to be interpreted according to the epistemic theory. The epistemic theory offers an alternative to traditional accounts that cash out causation either in terms of “difference-making” relations or in terms of mechanisms. According to the epistemic approach, causal claims tell us about which (...)
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  • Lindley Darden. Reviewed work: How Scientists Explain Disease by Paul Thagard. [REVIEW]Lindley Darden - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):352-354.
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  • Understanding mechanisms in the health sciences.Raffaella Campaner - 2010 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 32 (1):5-17.
    This article focuses on the assessment of mechanistic relations with specific attention to medicine, where mechanistic models are widely employed. I first survey recent contributions in the philosophical literature on mechanistic causation, and then take issue with Federica Russo and Jon Williamson’s thesis that two types of evidence, probabilistic and mechanistic, are at stake in the health sciences. I argue instead that a distinction should be drawn between previously acquired knowledge of mechanisms and yet-to-be-discovered knowledge of mechanisms and that both (...)
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  • Ecological explanation between manipulation and mechanism description.Viorel Pâslaru - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (5):821-837.
    James Woodward offers a conception of explanation and mechanism in terms of interventionist counterfactuals. Based on a case from ecology, I show that ecologists’ approach to that case satisfies Woodward’s conditions for explanation and mechanism, but his conception does not fully capture what ecologists view as explanatory. The new mechanistic philosophy likewise aims to describe central aspects of mechanisms, but I show that it is not sufficient to account for ecological mechanisms. I argue that in ecology explanation involves identification of (...)
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  • Nosological Diagnosis, Theories of Categorization, and Argumentations by Analogy.Francesco Gagliardi - 2022 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (2):311-330.
    The nosological diagnosis is a particular type of nontheoretical diagnosis consisting of identifying the disease that afflicts the patient without explaining the underlying etiopathological mechanisms. Its origins are within the essentialist point of view on the nature of diseases, which dates back at least to 18th-century taxonomy studies. In this article, we propose a model of nosological diagnosis as a two-phase process composed of the categorization of inductive inferences and argumentations by analogy. In the inductive phase, disease entities are identified (...)
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  • Adaptive speciation: the role of natural selection in mechanisms of geographic and non-geographic speciation.Jason M. Baker - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2):303-326.
    Recent discussion of mechanism has suggested new approaches to several issues in the philosophy of science, including theory structure, causal explanation, and reductionism. Here, I apply what I take to be the fruits of the Ônew mechanical philosophyÕ to an analysis of a contemporary debate in evolutionary biology about the role of natural selection in speciation. Traditional accounts of that debate focus on the geographic context of genetic divergence— namely, whether divergence in the absence of geographic isolation is possible (or (...)
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  • An explanatory coherence model of decision making in ill-structured problems.M. Laura Frigotto & Alessandro Rossi - 2015 - Mind and Society 14 (1):35-55.
    Classical models of decision making deal fairly well with uncertainty, where settings are well-structured in terms of goals, alternatives, and consequences. Conversely, the typical ill-structured nature of strategy choices remains a challenge for extant models. Such cases can hardly build on the past, and their novelty makes the prediction of consequences a very difficult and poorly robust task. The weakness of the classical expected utility model in representing such problems has not been adequately solved by recent extensions. In this paper (...)
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  • In Search of Psychiatric Kinds: Natural Kinds and Natural Classification in Psychiatry.Nicholas Slothouber - unknown
    In recent years both philosophers and scientists have asked whether or not our current kinds of mental disorder—e.g., schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder—are natural kinds; and, moreover, whether or not the search for natural kinds of mental disorder is a realistic desideratum for psychiatry. In this dissertation I clarify the sense in which a kind can be said to be “natural” or “real” and argue that, despite a few notable exceptions, kinds of mental disorder cannot be considered natural kinds. Furthermore, I (...)
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  • Evidence and the Assessment of Causal Relations in the Health Sciences.Raffaella Campaner & Maria Carla Galavotti - 2012 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26 (1):27-45.
    This contribution claims that the two fundamental notions of causation at work in the health sciences are manipulative and mechanistic, and investigates what kinds of evidence matter for the assessment of causal relations. This article is a development of our 2007 article, ‘Plurality of Causality’, where we argue for a pluralistic account of causation with an eye to econometrics and a single medical example. The present contribution has a wider focus, and considers the notion of evidence within a whole range (...)
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  • Can an Engineer Fix an Immune System?–Rethinking theoretical biology.Claudio Mattiussi - 2013 - Acta Biotheoretica 61 (2):223-258.
    In an instant classic paper ; 2002: 179–182) biologist Yuri Lazebnik deplores the poor effectiveness of the approach adopted by biologists to understand and “fix” biological systems. Lazebnik suggests that to remedy this state of things biologist should take inspiration from the approach used by engineers to design, understand, and troubleshoot technological systems. In the present paper I substantiate Lazebnik’s analysis by concretely showing how to apply the engineering approach to biological problems. I use an actual example of electronic circuit (...)
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  • Manipulative evidence and medical interventions: some qualifications.Raffaella Campaner & Matteo Cerri - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (2):1-15.
    The notion of causal evidence in medicine has been the subject of wide philosophical debate in recent years. The notion of evidence has been discussed mostly in connection with Evidence Based Medicine and, more in general, with the assessment of causal nexus in medical, and especially research contexts. “Manipulative evidence” is one of the notions of causal evidence that has stimulated much debate. It has been defined in slightly different ways, attributed different relevance, and recently placed at the core of (...)
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  • Scientific Disagreement and Evidential Pluralism: Lessons from the Studies on Hypercholesterolemia.Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, Federica Russo & Christian Wallmann - 2017 - Humana Mente 10 (32):75-116.
    Inconsistencies between scientific theories have been studied, by and large, from the perspective of paraconsistent logic. This approach considered the formal properties of theories and the structure of inferences one can legitimately draw from theories. However, inconsistencies can be also analysed from the perspective of modelling practices, in particular how modelling practices may lead scientists to form opinions and attitudes that are different, but not necessarily inconsistent. In such cases, it is preferable to talk about disagreement, rather than inconsistency. Disagreement (...)
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  • Rationality in discovery : a study of logic, cognition, computation and neuropharmacology. Boscvanh, Alexander Petrus Maria den - unknown
    Part I Introduction The specific problem adressed in this thesis is: what is the rational use of theory and experiment in the process of scientific discovery, in theory and in the practice of drug research for Parkinson’s disease? The thesis aims to answer the following specific questions: what is: 1) the structure of a theory?; 2) the process of scientific reasoning?; 3) the route between theory and experiment? In the first part I further discuss issues about rationality in science as (...)
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