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Arguments from knowability have largely been concerned with cases for and against realism, or truth as an epistemic vs. non-epistemic concept. This article proposes bringing Peirce's pragmaticism, called here 'action-first' epistemology, to bear on the issue. It is shown that a notion weaker than knowability, namely conjecturability, is epistemologically a better-suited notion to describe an essential component of scientific inquiry. Moreover, unlike knowability, conjecturability does not suffer from paradoxes. Given fundamental uncertainty that permeates inquiry, knowability and what Peirce took to be 'perfect knowledge' lose their appeal in epistemology of science. From the points of view of the logic for pragmatics and the modal translations given in this article, conjecturability and pragmaticism provide an enriched epistemology for scientific practices that can accommodate both epistemic and non-epistemic values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including clinical reasoning, epistemology and randomized controlled trials.

Clinical equipoise (CE) has been proposed as an ethical principle relating uncertainty and moral leeway in clinical research. Although CE has traditionally been indicated as a necessary condition for a morally justified introduction of a new RCT, questions related to the interpretation of this principle remain woefully open. Recent proposals to rehabilitate CE have divided the bioethical community on its ethical merits. This paper presents a new argument that brings out the epistemological difficulties we encounter in justifying CE as a principle to connect uncertainty and moral leeway in clinical ethics. The argument proposes, first, that the methodology of hypothetical retrospection (HR) is applicable to the RCT design and that it can accommodate uncertainty. As currently understood, however, HR should give up its reliance on the assumption of uncertainty transduction, because the latter assumes the principle of indifference, which does not accommodate uncertainty in the right way. The same principle is then seen to distort also the received interpretations of CE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We reconsider Dalla Pozza and Garola's pragmatic interpretation of intuitionistic logic regarded as a logic of assertions and their justifications and its relations with classical logic. We recall an extension of this approach to a logic dealing with assertions and obligations , related by a notion of causal implication developed especially by K. Ranalter. We focus on the extension to co-intuitionistic logic , seen as a logic of hypotheses in work by G. Bellin and others and on polarized bi-intuitionistic logic as a logic of assertions and hypotheses: looking at the S4 modal translation, we consider variants of the system AHL of bi-intuitionistic logic to represent the duality between the intuitionistic and the co-intuitionistic fragments, correcting and improving on the previous treatment. A computational interpretation of co-intuitionism as a distributed calculus of coroutines is then used to give an operational interpretation of subtraction. Work on linear co-intuitionism is then recalled, a linear calculus of co-intuitionistic coroutines which was used by Bellin to give a categorical model of co-intuitionistic linear logic, and also a probabilistic interpretation of linear co-intuitionism. Also we remark that by extending the language of intuitionistic logic we can express the notion of expectation , an assertion that in all situations the truth of p is possible and that in a logic of expectations the law of double negation holds. Similarly, extending co-intuitionistic logic, we can express the notion of conjecture that p , defined as a hypothesis that in some situation the truth of p is epistemically necessary.            to Carlo Dalla Pozza (1942–2014) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nursing knowledge stems from a dynamic interplay between population-based scientific knowledge (the general) and specific clinical cases (the particular). We compared the 'cascade model of knowledge translation', also known as 'classical biomedical model' in clinical practice (in which knowledge gained at population level may be applied directly to a specific clinical context), with an emergentist model of knowledge translation. The structure and dynamics of nursing knowledge are outlined, adopting the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values. Then, a (moderately) emergentist approach to nursing knowledge is proposed, based on the assumption of a two-way flow from the general to the particular and vice versa. The case of the 'placebo effect' is analysed as an example of emergentist knowledge. The placebo effect is usually considered difficult to be explained within the classical biomedical model, and we underscore its importance in shaping nursing knowledge. In fact, nurses are primarily responsible for administering placebo in the clinical setting and have an essential role in promoting the placebo effect and reducing the nocebo effect. The beliefs responsible for the placebo effect are as follows: (1) interactive, because they depend on the relationship between patients and health care professionals; (2) situated, because they occur in a given clinical context related to certain rituals; and (3) grounded on higher order beliefs concerning what an individual thinks about the beliefs of others. It is essential to know the clinical context and to understand other people's beliefs to make sense of the placebo effect. The placebo effect only works when the (higher order) beliefs of doctors, nurses and patients interact in a given setting. Finally, we argue for a close relationship between placebo effect and nursing knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The beliefs involved in the placebo effect are often assumed to be self-fulfilling, that is, the truth of these beliefs would merely require the patient to hold them. Such a view is commonly shared in epistemology. Many epistemologists focused, in fact, on the self-fulfilling nature of these beliefs, which have been investigated because they raise some important counterexamples to Nozick's "tracking theory of knowledge." We challenge the self-fulfilling nature of placebo-based beliefs in multi-agent contexts, analyzing their deep epistemological nature and the role of higher-order beliefs involved in the placebo effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Possibility is one of the most common modalities in reasoning and argumentation. Various kinds of modal concepts have been identified in philosophical and logical discussion of the metaphysics of modality. We focus here on the concept of clinical possibility. A critical analysis of what is intended as clinical possibility has not yet received sufficient examination, although the concept is extensively used in clinical reasoning. We present arguments to emphasize some desirable features associated with the concept of clinical possibility. We argue that almost all clinical possibilities are potentialities, that is, possibilities that may be actualized by effective, appropriate and feasible interventions. However, in some limited cases, even mere possibilities - which may or may not be actualized, since we do not have the required knowledge - may be involved in clinical reasoning, and we present some examples in this paper. We then introduce some basic views on the nature of possibility showing their validity and limitations when applied to the concept of clinical possibility. Lastly, we conjecture that clinical possibility is a normative modality that can be formalized in a multimodal system with epistemic and deontic logical operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the question of normative analysis of the value‐based aspects of nursing. In our perspective, values in science may be distinguished into (i) epistemic when related to the goals of truth and objectivity and (ii) non‐epistemic when related to social, cultural or political aspects. Furthermore, values can be called constitutive when necessary for a scientific enterprise, or contextual when contingently associated with science. Analysis of the roles of the various forms of values and models of knowledge translation provides the ground to understand the specific role of values in nursing. A conceptual framework has been built to classify some of the classical perspectives on nursing knowledge and to examine the relationships between values and different forms of knowledge in nursing. It follows that adopting a normative perspective in the analysis of nursing knowledge provides key elements to identify its proper dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]