Feb 6, 2017 10:59 PM
(This post was last modified: Feb 6, 2017 11:05 PM by C C.)
Why children ask ‘Why?’ and what makes a good explanation
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-children-ask-w...xplanation
EXCERPT: [...] What is a good explanation? And how can we find out? Philosophers of science have traditionally answered these questions by concentrating on the norms governing scientists’ explanatory practice, evaluating these norms on the basis of their intuitions on a battery of cases involving putative explanations....
Is it time to abandon the medical construct of being normal?
https://aeon.co/essays/is-it-time-to-aba...ing-normal
EXCERPT: The problem of variation haunts medical science. In the 19th century, one of the founders of experimental medicine, the French physiologist Claude Bernard, claimed that individual variability was an obstacle to medical judgment. If we could show that the abnormal was a mere quantitative deviation from the normal, he wrote, we would possess the key to treating any given individual, no matter how he or she veered from the rest. After all, if the pathological is merely a deviation from the normal, then not only the aim but the very possibility of the therapeutic act becomes clear: return the sick individual, organ, cell or system back to a normal state.
This view still guides much of biomedical research; organisms, cells, gene networks and more are routinely perturbed to determine how these systems ‘normally’ function. Researchers disrupt or destroy in order to establish standards and to develop new treatments.
But what are we talking about when we talk about normal physiology? If, as the philosopher Sara Moghaddam-Taaheri wrote in 2011, we see abnormality not as ‘broken normal’ but as a qualitatively different state, it would be difficult to understand how such interventions could restore the sick to health.
While medical researchers might miss such fine points, philosophers of medicine have been parsing the nuances and striving to define ‘normal’ for years. One thought experiment asks us to consider...
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-children-ask-w...xplanation
EXCERPT: [...] What is a good explanation? And how can we find out? Philosophers of science have traditionally answered these questions by concentrating on the norms governing scientists’ explanatory practice, evaluating these norms on the basis of their intuitions on a battery of cases involving putative explanations....
Is it time to abandon the medical construct of being normal?
https://aeon.co/essays/is-it-time-to-aba...ing-normal
EXCERPT: The problem of variation haunts medical science. In the 19th century, one of the founders of experimental medicine, the French physiologist Claude Bernard, claimed that individual variability was an obstacle to medical judgment. If we could show that the abnormal was a mere quantitative deviation from the normal, he wrote, we would possess the key to treating any given individual, no matter how he or she veered from the rest. After all, if the pathological is merely a deviation from the normal, then not only the aim but the very possibility of the therapeutic act becomes clear: return the sick individual, organ, cell or system back to a normal state.
This view still guides much of biomedical research; organisms, cells, gene networks and more are routinely perturbed to determine how these systems ‘normally’ function. Researchers disrupt or destroy in order to establish standards and to develop new treatments.
But what are we talking about when we talk about normal physiology? If, as the philosopher Sara Moghaddam-Taaheri wrote in 2011, we see abnormality not as ‘broken normal’ but as a qualitatively different state, it would be difficult to understand how such interventions could restore the sick to health.
While medical researchers might miss such fine points, philosophers of medicine have been parsing the nuances and striving to define ‘normal’ for years. One thought experiment asks us to consider...
