Pellegrino and Thomasma’s Anatomy of Clinical Judgments Revisited
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1981, Edmund Pellegrino and David Thomasma published A Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice. In this work, they situated the process of clinical judgment in the clinical encounter between an individual doctor and their patient. The encounter revolves around three questions: What can be wrong? What can be done? And what should be done for this patient? They analyzed the complete process of clinical reasoning involving both technical and ethical aspects. Pellegrino and Thomasma's subsequent work focused more on professionalism and ethics, while more recent analysis of clinical decision-making has been in the realm of psychology rather than along philosophical lines, particularly in the use of dual-process theory. Here we seek to review Pellegrino and Thomasma's analysis and to reintegrate the technical and ethical aspects of clinical reasoning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.092 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".