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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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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Springer Netherlands
2016
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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 |
author_sort | Maung, Hane Htut |
collection | PubMed |
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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5325847 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | Springer Netherlands |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
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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