The practices of medicine pose some important challenges to philosophy. Overdiagnosis, broadly understood as the excessive use of tests, has been subject to a recent philosophical investigation. A central problem concerns the main characterization of overdiagnosis as based on a counterfactual reasoning, which, due to its own nature, it is open to criticisms about how to make it more meaningful from a factual perspective. On the other hand, knowledge, as the subject matter of philosophy and whose search is its main aim, is downplayed in the particular domain of medicine, when we are able to understand that knowing is undesirable in some circumstances. That seems quite incompatible also concerning the aims of science. How could we reconcile the scientific and epistemological purposes of medicine with the human dimension of avoiding doing harm in the search for knowledge? In this talk, I will present a general perspective on the topic and I will explore some contributions to the current debate, especially from an epistemological perspective.
Renata Arruda is a permanent lecturer at the Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil. She has been teaching general philosophy of science and introductory logic for several years, and has been leading an international research group on her area of expertise as well as being a collaborator in other research groups based in Chile, Spain, and Norway. She is best known for her work in philosophy of medicine and of epidemiology, and during her stay at the CPS, her research will focus on the ontology and epistemology of health and disease processes in medicine and epidemiology, especially the interplay between population data and the individual patient in the problem of overdiagnosis.