Osimani, Barbara (2018) What's Hot in Mathematical Philosophy. Formal Epistemology of Medicine. University of Kent, Center for Reasoning, Canterbury.
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Abstract
“Formal Epistemology of Medicine” is a new strand of research analysing issues arising in medical epistemology by examining the interaction of methodological, social and regulatory dimensions in medicine. The motivation for adopting a formal approach stems from its higher capability to describe the “rules of the game” and to provide an analytic explanatory account of the investigated phenomena.
Formalisation of scientific inference within the Bayesian epistemology tradition has generally aimed at providing mathematical explanations of various inferential phenomena in the sciences: confirmatory support of coherent evidence, confirmatory role of the explanatory power, the role of replication in assessing the reliability of evidence, the no-alternatives and no-miracles arguments. Drawing on this tradition we exploit the confirmatory support of heterogeneous sources of evidence, and expand the justificatory toolset in such domains as drug risk management and policy-making (Landes J. Osimani B. Poellinger R. (2017) Epistemology of causal inference in pharmacology. Towards a framework for the assessment of harms. European Journal for Philosophy of Science). This also goes in the direction advocated by Gelman (Gelman A. Working through some issues. Significance 12.3 (2015): 33-35.) and Marsman et al. (A Bayesian bird's eye view of ‘Replications of important results in social psychology’. R Soc Open Sci. 2017, 4(1): 160426), both invoking a more comprehensive approach to evidence, in the aftermath of the “reproducibility crisis”.
We also investigate the joint interaction of diverse dimensions of evidence (reliability, consistency, strength, variety) by developing a Bayesian model of hypothesis confirmation which takes into account both random and systematic error (Osimani B., Landes J. (2021). Consistently with previous attemps to formalize the Variety of Evidence, our model also shows violation of the VET; however, the area of failure is considerably smaller and depends on the ratio of false to true positives of the biased vs. reliable instrument affected by random error. The take-home message is that replication with the same instrument is favoured when the noise of the reliable instrument exceeds the systematic error of the biased one.
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| Item Type: | Other | ||||||
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| Keywords: | Formal Epistemology, Medical Epistemology, Variety of Evidence Thesis, bias, random error | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > Evidence Specific Sciences > Medicine Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics |
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| Depositing User: | Prof. Barbara Osimani | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 31 Jul 2021 12:38 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 31 Jul 2021 12:38 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 19388 | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | The Reasoner | ||||||
| Publisher: | University of Kent, Center for Reasoning | ||||||
| Official URL: | http://www.thereasoner.org/ | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > Evidence Specific Sciences > Medicine Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics |
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| Date: | February 2018 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 15-16 | ||||||
| Volume: | 12 | ||||||
| Number: | 2 | ||||||
| ISSN: | 1757-0522 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/19388 |
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