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Biomedical subjects

A Grünbaum

Publications and source records attributed to A Grünbaum.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1998

[Not Available].

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History, 19th Century↗
PubMed1990

"Meaning" connections and causal connections in the human sciences: the poverty of hermeneutic philosophy.

In much of psychoanalytic theory and therapy, Freud repeatedly inferred a causal connection between thematically kindred events by relying on the kinship between their thematic contents. This paper strongly endorses his search for causal explanations. But it argues in detail that (1) his causal inferences from thematic connections rest on an important fallacy, which undermines major etiologic conclusions in psychoanalysis; (2) a related, weighty inferential error is damaging to the Freudian theory of transference, when it infers the pathogenic role of an early childhood scenario from the thematic reenactment (recapitulation) of that scenario in the adult patient's interactions with the analyst, and with other people. Both arguments draw on subject matter in psychoanalysis, physics, evolutionary biology, common-sense psychology, history, and medicine to arrive at a fundamental caveat for all of the sciences: Even when the thematic kinship (or so-called "meaning connection") between events is indeed of very high degree, this fact itself does not license the inference of a causal linkage between these events. A corollary of this result is that we must reject the accusation of Karl Jaspers and the hermeneutic philosophers that Freud's own conception of the psychoanalytic enterprise suffered from a "scientistic self-misunderstanding."

Defense Mechanisms↗
PubMed1986

The placebo concept in medicine and psychiatry.

The standard technical vocabulary used to define placebo therapies and experimental placebo controls in medicine and psychiatry is both confusing and obscure. To achieve conceptual clarity in the theory of placebogenic phenomena, this paper offers a rigorous articulation of the placebo notion, a lucid new terminology that obviates the defects intrinsic to the traditional locutions employed in the placebo literature, and a substantial revamping of A. K. Shapiro's influential prior definition of 'placebo'. This paper supersedes an earlier version (Grünbaum, 1981).

Clinical Trials as Topic↗
PubMed1968

Are "infinity machines" paradoxical? Can processes involving an infinite sequence of operations or "acts" be completed in a finite time?

The mathematical physicist Hermann Weyl (2) has claimed that, unless machines can accomplish an infinite sequence of distinct operations in a finite time, the standard mathematical theory of motion is beset by one of Zeno's kinematical paradoxes. Hence I have compared the kinematics of several such "infinity machines" to the kinematics of the continuous motion of Achilles. And I have argued that, while some designs for infinity machines are indeed inconsistent, others are not impossible on purely kinematical grounds. This argument was coupled with several reasons for denying Zeno's and A. N. Whitehead's allegation of paradox against the mathematical, description of the motion of Achilles.

Mathematics↗