CEFISES Seminar: Cristina Barés Gómez, “Abduction in medical reasoning: medical practice and medical research.”

Livestream https://www.youtube.com/@CEFISES

Series: Medicine

Speaker: Cristina Barés Gómez (Universidad de Sevilla)

Title: Abduction in medical reasoning: medical practice and medical research.

Abstract

Medical reasoning involves not only diagnosis but also prognosis, therapy planning, and patient monitoring. These different forms of reasoning can be understood in terms of hypotheses introduced through abductive inference, followed by deductive predictions and, subsequently, inductive confirmation. However, abductive hypotheses are not necessarily followed immediately by a deductive-inductive phase; instead, they may serve as the basis for further abductive inferences and the formulation of new hypotheses.

In the medical practice, we use to focus on diagnosis. Diagnostic, therapeutic, and monitoring hypotheses can be interconnected within the Gabbay and Woods model, in which abduction is understood as an ignorance-preserving form of inference. On this account, a diagnostic hypothesis may be used as a premise in subsequent abductiveinferences, giving rise to therapeutic hypotheses or monitoring strategies even before the initial hypothesis has been confirmed. This allows hypotheses to play an active role in medical reasoning while remaining provisional.

Taking medical research into account, although the focus may differ, we can also identify a similar structure involving abduction, deduction, and induction. The abductive phase is often understood as playing a crucial role in scientific discovery, particularly when a new hypothesis is proposed to explain a phenomenon. In this context, the concept of mechanism becomes fundamental, since the introduction of a new mechanism as an abductive hypothesis aimed is conceived at explaining the phenomenon under investigation. This also could be in a way go and back circle.

In particular, we argue that medical reasoning, both in clinical practice and in research, should not be understood as a linear progression from abduction to deduction and induction. Rather, hypotheses may remain operative throughout the reasoning process, generating further hypotheses and guiding therapeutic and monitoring decisions even before they are ultimately confirmed or rejected. In scientific research, moreover, hypotheses may occupy different positions within the reasoning process: a hypothesis may constitute the starting point of an investigation, but it may also emerge as the outcome of previous reasoning and thereby serve as the starting point for subsequent inquiry. Thus, rather than following a fixed sequence of inferential stages, medical reasoning involves an ongoing and dynamic interaction between hypotheses and different forms of inference.

Barés, C. and Fontaine, M. 2025. Knowledge-enhancing mechanistic hypotheses. Abduction, Reason & Science. A Symposium in honor of the 70th birthday of Lorenzo Magnani. Springer’s Synthese Book Library.

Barés, C. and Fontaine, M. 2022. Medical Reasoning and the GW Model of Abduction.In Handbook of Abductive Cognition, L.Magnani, ed., pp.1–26.Springer.

Magnani, L. 2001. Abduction, Reason and Science: Processes of Discovery and Explanation. Dordrecht. Kluwer.

Peirce, C. S. 1931/1958. Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Harvard University Press.

Russo, F., & Williamson, J. 2007. Interpreting causality in the health sciences. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21(2): 157–170.

Woods, J. 2013. Errors of Reasoning. Naturalizing the Logic of Inference. London. College Publications.