Wandrey, Mona-Marie (2025) Patient values and inductive risk in disorders of consciousness. [Preprint]

Text Patient values and inductive risk (accepted version).docx Download (350kB)

Abstract

Diagnosing patients with disorders of consciousness involves inductive risk: the risk of false negative and false positive results when gathering and interpreting evidence of consciousness. A recent proposal suggests mitigating that risk by incorporating patient values into methodological choices at the level of individual diagnostic techniques: when using machine-learning algorithms to detect neural evidence of responsiveness to commands, clinicians should consider the patient’s own preferences about whether avoiding false positives or false negatives takes priority (Birch, 2023). In this paper, I argue that this proposal raises concerns about how to ensure that inevitable non-epistemic value judgments do not outweigh epistemic considerations. Additionally, it comes with challenges related to the predictive accuracy of surrogate decision-makers and the decisional burden imposed on them. Hence, I argue that patient values should not be incorporated at the level of gathering evidence of consciousness, but that they should play the leading role when considering how to respond to that evidence.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Wandrey, Mona-Marie mmw54@cam.ac.uk 0000-0002-0063-4973
Additional Information:	Accepted version, forthcoming in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science.
Keywords:	Inductive Risk, Values in Science, Disorders of Consciousness, Decision-Making under Uncertainty, Surrogate Decision-Making, Patient Autonomy
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Medicine > Biomedical Ethics Specific Sciences > Neuroscience > Cognitive Neuroscience Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science > Consciousness General Issues > Values In Science
Depositing User:	Ms Mona-Marie Wandrey
Date Deposited:	14 Jul 2025 14:12
Last Modified:	14 Jul 2025 14:12
Item ID:	25945
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Medicine > Biomedical Ethics Specific Sciences > Neuroscience > Cognitive Neuroscience Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science > Consciousness General Issues > Values In Science
Date:	14 July 2025
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/25945

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