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 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

A Theory of Non-Universal Laws

Laws in the special sciences are usually regarded to be non-universal. A theory of laws in the special sciences faces two challenges: (I) According to Lange’s dilemma, laws in the special sciences are either false or trivially true; (II) they have to meet the Requirement of Relevance, which a way to require the non-accidentality of special science laws. I argue that both challenges can be meet, if one distinguishes four dimensions of (non-)universality. The upshot is that I argue for the following explication of special science laws: L is a special science law iff (1) L is a system law, (2) L is quasi-Newtonian, and (3) L is minimally invariant

Multilevel Reality, Mechanistic Explanations, and Intertheoretic Reductions

In this paper I argue that the question of interlevel explanations runs against the old and thorny problem of the intertheoretical reductions. In order to find a clue as to the solution of this last problem, I shall distinguish, though only provisionally and ideal-typically, between two sorts of intertheoretical or interlevel relations, a weak and a strong one. This distinction, somewhat like a masonry falsework, will be at least in a sense removed, because both types of reduction cannot exist in their pure form. They are only idealised forms of reduction, ideal types between which we find an indefinite number of intermediate forms of actual reductions. In both cases, relating multiple perspectives to one another to better understand the subject-matter under investigation requires constructing a new, wider or deeper perspective. And in both cases, the question of interlevel explanatory reductions, just as that of intertheoretical ones, cannot be answered abstractly, by purely philosophical considerations, but only with reference to, and in accordance with, the practice of scientists and the history of science. This is true not only for physical, but also for biological theories, as I shall briefly illustrate by two examples taken from biology (the protein folding field and today\u2019s debate about cancer research)