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The causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses

Diagnoses in medicine are often taken to serve as explanations of patients’ symptoms and signs. This article examines how they do so. I begin by arguing that although some instances of diagnostic explanation can be formulated as covering law arguments, they are explanatory neither in virtue of their...

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Autor principal: Maung, Hane Htut
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Netherlands 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325847/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27638682
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11017-016-9377-5
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author Maung, Hane Htut
author_facet Maung, Hane Htut
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description Diagnoses in medicine are often taken to serve as explanations of patients’ symptoms and signs. This article examines how they do so. I begin by arguing that although some instances of diagnostic explanation can be formulated as covering law arguments, they are explanatory neither in virtue of their argumentative structures nor in virtue of general regularities between diagnoses and clinical presentations. I then consider the theory that medical diagnoses explain symptoms and signs by identifying their actual causes in particular cases. While I take this to be largely correct, I argue that for a diagnosis to function as a satisfactory causal explanation of a patient’s symptoms and signs, it also needs to be supplemented by understanding the mechanisms by which the identified cause produces the symptoms and signs. This mechanistic understanding comes not from the diagnosis itself, but rather from the theoretical framework within which the physician operates.
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spelling pubmed-53258472017-03-09 The causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses Maung, Hane Htut Theor Med Bioeth Article Diagnoses in medicine are often taken to serve as explanations of patients’ symptoms and signs. This article examines how they do so. I begin by arguing that although some instances of diagnostic explanation can be formulated as covering law arguments, they are explanatory neither in virtue of their argumentative structures nor in virtue of general regularities between diagnoses and clinical presentations. I then consider the theory that medical diagnoses explain symptoms and signs by identifying their actual causes in particular cases. While I take this to be largely correct, I argue that for a diagnosis to function as a satisfactory causal explanation of a patient’s symptoms and signs, it also needs to be supplemented by understanding the mechanisms by which the identified cause produces the symptoms and signs. This mechanistic understanding comes not from the diagnosis itself, but rather from the theoretical framework within which the physician operates. Springer Netherlands 2016-09-16 2017 /pmc/articles/PMC5325847/ /pubmed/27638682 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11017-016-9377-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Maung, Hane Htut
The causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses
title The causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses
title_full The causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses
title_fullStr The causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses
title_full_unstemmed The causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses
title_short The causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses
title_sort causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325847/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27638682
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11017-016-9377-5
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