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Data science, and related data infrastructures and analytic tools, are frequently invoked as a major factor underpinning contemporary transformations in medical research, diagnosis and treatment. This paper discusses whether and how this is happening, and what the implications may be for philosophical understandings of the production, assessment an...

Cancer is often conceptualized in terms of selective conflict between cell and organism (Greaves 2015, Aktipis 2020). On this view, cancer involves a form of multi-level selection in which the cancerous cell phenotype is favored by selection at the cell level but opposed by selection at the organism level. Recently, Gardner (2015) and Shpak and Lu ...

We examine arguments for and against the use of mechanistic evidence in assessing treatment efficacy and find that advocates of EBM+ and their critics have largely been talking past each other due to difference in focus. We explore aducanumab for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease as a case which may (eventually) speak to the role of EBM+ in ph...

Absolute and relative outcome measures measure a treatment’s effect size, purporting to inform treatment choices. I argue that absolute measures are at least as good as, if not better than, relative ones for informing rational decisions across choice scenarios. Specifically, this dominance of absolute measures holds for choices between a treatmen...

In this symposium, we philosophically investigate the nature of contemporary and historical versions of scientific medicine as well as visions for its future, drawing on historical, empirical and scientific perspectives. Scientific medicine is the main focus of research in philosophy of science and medicine, but the ways in which it is ‘scientifi...

Inferences from clinical research results to estimates of therapeutic effectiveness suffer due to various biases. I argue that predictions of medical effectiveness are prone to failure because current medical research overlooks the impact of a particularly detrimental set of biases: meta-biases. Meta-biases are linked to higher-level characteristic...

This paper draws on Quill Kukla’s “Institutional Definition of Health” to provide a definition of “psychiatric condition” that delineates the proper bounds of psychiatry. I argue that this definition must include requirements that psychiatrization of a condition benefit the well-being of 1) the society as a collective, and 2) the individu...

Precision medicine is motivated by the insight that patients and their problems show great variability and ideally should be treated in way that accounts for the individual’s biology and context. Realizing this vision rests on the development of new model systems that can recapitulate the physiological context beyond genomics and account for rele...

Cancer researchers and clinicians speak of both cancer “drivers” and “actionable” mutations. In this paper, we explore how these two concepts are overlapping, and how they are different. Cases like the BCR-ABL1 gene fusion found in people with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) have served as exemplars in clinical teaching and research abou...

According to a view that is gaining traction in current philosophy of science, what best describes the aim of scientific inquiries is not truth or knowledge about some target phenomenon, but understanding, which is taken to be a distinct cognitive accomplishment. At the same time, scientific inquiry is thought to be characterized by a certain syste...

Cancer cells keep accumulating alterations leading to a diversification through space and time. This diversity in the composition of cancer cells represents a major challenge for cancer treatment as it is difficult (if possible, at all) to find a treatment that works on all the cancer cells. The clonal evolution model introduces evolutionary tools ...

Few would deny that contemporary western medicine is scientific, but what exactly is implied by this claim? Recent work in philosophy of science has brought research on the demarcation problem to bear on this question and has argued that medicine is a science. Authors disagree on what demarcates scientific medicine as a science from pseudosciences ...

Descriptive Summary: Participants in this symposium will bring diverse perspectives to philosophical issues arising out of cancer science and medicine. Speakers will discuss conceptual and epistemic issues arising in cancer research, such as how best to define cancer “drivers” and “actionable” mutations, whether and in what senses cancer is...