Psychiatry and the Inference to the Best Explanation

• Autores: Juan Ernesto Calderón
• Localización: Psychiatry and Neuroscience Update: From Epistemology to Clinical Psychiatry – Vol. IV / Pascual Angel Gargiulo (ed. lit.), Humberto Luis Mesones Arroyo (ed. lit.), 2021, ISBN 978-3-030-61721-9, págs. 3-8
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Critical rationalism sustains that the best way to evaluate scientific theories is through the hypothetico-deductive method. Hypotheses are tested deducing the observational consequences from them. Falsifying hypotheses is science’s task, which implies proposing hypotheses able to surpass the previous ones in their explanatory content and precision. However, according to the Duhem-Quine hypothesis, it is impossible to falsify a hypothesis in a conclusive way. For this reason, several authors affirm that the Popperian demarcation criterion is not valid in Psychiatry and propose to save/rescue the clinical results without using the categories of the Philosophy of Science. To solve this problem, the key is to look for another method which offers enough epistemic strength and which is enlarging at the same time. The difficulties found in Falsacionism can be overcome using the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). In the case of Psychiatry, the IBE is a tool which allows to explain research and clinical practice and also to enquire into the so-called Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). The EBM is a way of medical practice which has had a great impact and which is strongly questioned nowadays. These questioning stem from the fact that the EBM is not placed inside a method which permits to understand the rationality of practice, even though this rationality of practice can, in fact, be explained by the IBE.