Claude Bernard’s Medical Epistemology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48160/18532330me6.250Keywords:
Claude Bernard, hipothetico-deductivism, medical epistemologyAbstract
The article shows that the experimental method of physiology, which Claude Bernard exposes almost 70 years before Karl Popper, coincides even in his terms with the hypothetical deductive method. This fact was, however, largely unknown to the philosophers of science in spite of it structured the biological research, or Freud’s psychoanalytic writings — due to that he knew the method when he stayed in Paris as a neurophysiologist.
The reconstruction of the research in which Claude Barnard discovers the mechanisms that make the blood glucose level constant even though the carbohydrate intake is not, the initial paradigmatic case of physiology, allows us to identify a specific nucleus of interrelated terms — a structure — that makes the community of physiologists investigate values that remain constant in the most diverse processes — digestive, hormonal, neurological, circulatory — and unravel the mechanisms — that make it possible.
It is proposed, furthermore, that the notion of homeostasis — central to physiology — is taken as feedback in cybernetics and as regulation in the economy.
The philosophy of medicine, still at issue in 1976, had pointed to the path of method and structure of science long before philosophy of science. But it did not know it.
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