The Experts below are selected from a list of 183 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Valentine B. Andela - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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a Covering Law Model of global health governance
2014Co-Authors: Valentine B. AndelaAbstract:The debate on global health governance (GHG) reveals state and non-state actors at cross-purposes in matters of research development, evidence-based medicine, economic rights and security. In the interest of critical and constructive dialogue, this paper proposes a Model of cause and explanation (‘Covering-Law Model’) that incorporates inductive-statistical [IS] to deductive-nomological [DN] explanations of GHG in terms of (A) a transcendent worldview (B) that connects every aspect of the global health problematic and (C) that brings coherence to empirical inquiry. The ‘Covering-Law Model’ draws on a cross-disciplinary body of knowledge and a central case method grounded in a ten year experiment in the socio-legal construction of global health (Cancer-Africa™), that included protracted litigation in U.S. federal courts, as a matter of course, probative of the problematic of GHG. Modeled on the Cartesian architectonic, the ‘Covering-Law Model’ incorporates the (A) res cogitans or the [IS] basis of the thinking Being (B) res extensa or the [DN] basis of extended Being and (C) res infinitum or the [DN] basis of infinite Being. Finally, this paper subjects the ‘Covering-Law Model’ to the critical reflection and deliberation of the research community and the public-at-large, and so contributes to the growing convergence of international relations and international Law in three areas-: A) international governance; B) social construction; and C) liberal agency.
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A ‘Covering-Law Model’ of Global Health Governance
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014Co-Authors: Valentine B. AndelaAbstract:The debate on global health governance (GHG) reveals state and non-state actors at cross-purposes in matters of research development, evidence-based medicine, economic rights and security. In the interest of critical and constructive dialogue, this paper proposes a Model of cause and explanation (‘Covering-Law Model’) that incorporates inductive-statistical [IS] to deductive-nomological [DN] explanations of GHG in terms of (A) a transcendent worldview (B) that connects every aspect of the global health problematic and (C) that brings coherence to empirical inquiry. The ‘Covering-Law Model’ draws on a cross-disciplinary body of knowledge and a central case method grounded in a ten year experiment in the socio-legal construction of global health (Cancer-Africa™), that included protracted litigation in U.S. federal courts, as a matter of course, probative of the problematic of GHG. Modeled on the Cartesian architectonic, the ‘Covering-Law Model’ incorporates the (A) res cogitans or the [IS] basis of the thinking Being (B) res extensa or the [DN] basis of extended Being and (C) res infinitum or the [DN] basis of infinite Being. Finally, this paper subjects the ‘Covering-Law Model’ to the critical reflection and deliberation of the research community and the public-at-large, and so contributes to the growing convergence of international relations and international Law in three areas-: A) international governance; B) social construction; and C) liberal agency.
Karl W. Lauterbach - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Inductive reasoning in medicine: lessons from Carl Gustav Hempel's 'inductive-statistical' Model.
Journal of evaluation in clinical practice, 2003Co-Authors: Afschin Gandjour, Karl W. LauterbachAbstract:The purpose of this paper is to discuss both the fundamental requirements of sound scientific explanations and predictions and common fallacies that occur in explaining and predicting medical problems. To this end, the paper presents Carl Gustav Hempel's ‘Covering-Law’ Model (1948 and 1962) and reviews some of the criticism of the Model. The strength of Hempel's Model is that it shows that inductive arguments, when applied with the requirement of maximal specificity, can serve as explanations as well as predictions. The major weakness of the ‘Covering-Law’ Model, its inability to portray causal relatedness, has been addressed by philosophers such as Wesley Salmon. While few philosophers today agree with the ‘Covering-Law’ Model in its original formulation, there is widespread consensus that the Law has made a central contribution to describing the fundamental requirements of sound scientific explanations. Applying this Model and its revisions in the medical context may help uncover potentially undetected fallacies in reasoning when explaining and predicting medical problems.
Joel Press - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Biological Explanations as Cursory Covering Law Explanations
History Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, 2015Co-Authors: Joel PressAbstract:There have been two main sorts of response to difficulties in applying the Covering Law Model of explanation to biology. The first sort, which I call modified Law accounts, more or less maintain the logical structure of Covering Law explanations, but weaken or alter the criteria of Lawhood, so that inference from biological generalizations failing in one way or another to satisfy stricter criteria are still deemed explanatory. The second sort, which I call Lawless accounts, involve a more wholesale rejection of the Covering Law Model. According to these views, biological explanations are not inferences from natural Laws at all. The new mechanist account is a promising example. I have been developing a third sort of account, which I call the cursory Covering Law Model. According to this Model, biological explanations can be accommodated within the Covering Law Model without the weakening of the Law constraint envisaged in the modified Law accounts, provided it is permissible to employ approximating statements about Laws as premises in the explanation. I argue that the cursory Covering Law Model subsumes and explains the insights of both the modified Law and Lawless accounts. It can accommodate the apparent lack of strict biological Laws while nevertheless explaining how less-strict biological generalizations can be the basis for cursory Covering Law explanations. It can also explain why biology significantly involves the discovery of biological mechanisms. Furthermore, since both the modified Law and Lawless accounts are consistent with the cursory Covering Law Model, any difficulties in understanding biological explanation addressed by the newer approaches will be difficulties that can be addressed equally well within the Covering Law Model.
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Physical explanations and biological explanations, empirical Laws and a priori Laws
Biology & Philosophy, 2009Co-Authors: Joel PressAbstract:Philosophers intent upon characterizing the difference between physics and biology often seize upon the purported fact that physical explanations conform more closely to the Covering Law Model than biological explanations. Central to this purported difference is the role of Laws of nature in the explanations of these two sciences. However, I argue that, although certain important differences between physics and biology can be highlighted by differences between physical and biological explanations, these differences are not differences in the degree to which those explanations conform to the Covering Law Model, which fits biology about as well as it does physics.
Kurt Danziger - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Neither Science nor History
Psychological Inquiry, 1995Co-Authors: Kurt DanzigerAbstract:To a historian of the social sciences, Simonton's appeal is likely to evoke strong echoes of 19th-century proposals for a marriage between history and statistics. The most influential of these proposals was that of T. H. Buckle (1865), who thought that history could be turned into a science by showing that it depended on "social Laws" conceived as statistical generalizations. Although that notion was kept afloat for a time by a wave of 19th-century positivism, it soon ran into difficulties (Porter, 1986). That led to various attempts at sorting out the difference between science and history. Among these, Wilhelm Windelband's (1904) is the most relevant in the present context because Simonton uses the nomothetic-idiographic distinction, which goes back to this philosopher. But, between Windelband in 1894 and Simonton a century later, a conceptual shift occurred that enables the latter to return to a position more characteristic of an earlier philosophy. Simonton, in common with other behavioral scientists, identifies the idiographic with unique facts"names, dates, and places." Historical discourse then consists of two kinds of statements-those that refer to unique facts and those that imply generalizations, nomothetic or historical. But, this conceptual scheme has no place for what Windelband's term idiographic was meant to characterize-namely, the distinctive features of historical explanation. Windelband (1904) introduced his famous polarity in order to distinguish between two kinds of science, not between science and nonscience. The two kinds of science were what he called "sciences of Law" (Gesetzeswissenschaften) and "sciences of events" (Ereigniswissenschaften). The former were "nomothetic", the latter "idiographic," but they were both sciences, both explanatory, although in different ways. The historical or idiographic sciences accomplish their explanatory task by demonstrating the interconnectedness of "a series of deeds" or of the life of an individual or a people or by showing "the character and development of a language, a religion, a system of jurisprudence" (Windelband, 1904, p. 11). Idiographic sciences look for a "historically determined pattern" (p. 12). (The term that Windelband used is Gestalt.) Historical explanation deals in part-whole relations, not in logical subsumption under superordinate "Laws," historical or otherwise. With the rise of 20th-century positivism, there was a renewed attempt to annex historical explanation to scientific explanation through an appeal to the ubiquity of the "Covering Law" Model (Hempel, 1959). But, after about 1965, the topic ceased to arouse much interest, partly because of the generally recognized inadequacies of the Covering-Law Model, even in the case of the physical sciences (Kitcher & Salmon, 1989), and partly because historians did not find Covering-Law explanations in the least helpful (Novick, 1988). Because a rather extensive treatment of many of the issues raised by Simonton's proposals is to be found in these earlier discussions, I mention only one point that seems to be of special relevance-a point concerning the role of specific hypotheses in historical and in scientific discourse. In the latter, specific hypotheses can be considered in isolation and judged by the logic of empirical confirmation. But the general statements that form part of historical discourse are not detachable in this way. They do not function as potential Covering Laws but as textual components in the "synoptic" description of very complex situations. As one contributor to this discussion put it, one should not insist that historians "hand out piecemeal, like the slips in fortune cookies, tested hypotheses as 'what history teaches"' (Mink, 1966, p. 189). To do that is to pervert the purpose of historical inquiry. In the usual reading of a historical text, the meaning of each statement depends on its contribution to the description of what Windelband would have called a "historically determined Gestalt." What Simonton proposes is that, in the case of the subgenre of psychologists' texts on the history of their subject, we substitute for this usual reading a new reading that treats these texts as though they were not historical but scientific. This is an essentially hermeneutic project of textual-meaning interpretation that is made possible by the ambiguity of many discursive elements when isolated
Afschin Gandjour - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Inductive reasoning in medicine: lessons from Carl Gustav Hempel's 'inductive-statistical' Model.
Journal of evaluation in clinical practice, 2003Co-Authors: Afschin Gandjour, Karl W. LauterbachAbstract:The purpose of this paper is to discuss both the fundamental requirements of sound scientific explanations and predictions and common fallacies that occur in explaining and predicting medical problems. To this end, the paper presents Carl Gustav Hempel's ‘Covering-Law’ Model (1948 and 1962) and reviews some of the criticism of the Model. The strength of Hempel's Model is that it shows that inductive arguments, when applied with the requirement of maximal specificity, can serve as explanations as well as predictions. The major weakness of the ‘Covering-Law’ Model, its inability to portray causal relatedness, has been addressed by philosophers such as Wesley Salmon. While few philosophers today agree with the ‘Covering-Law’ Model in its original formulation, there is widespread consensus that the Law has made a central contribution to describing the fundamental requirements of sound scientific explanations. Applying this Model and its revisions in the medical context may help uncover potentially undetected fallacies in reasoning when explaining and predicting medical problems.
