Peterson Andrew
Rotman Institute of Philosophy and The Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
Neurosci Conscious. 2016 Jan;2016(1):niw011. doi: 10.1093/nc/niw011. Epub 2016 Aug 20.
Behavioral diagnosis of global disorders of consciousness is difficult and errors in diagnosis occur often. Recent advances in neuroimaging may resolve this problem. However, clinical translation of neuroimaging requires clinical validation. Applying the orthodox approach of clinical validation to neuroimaging raises two critical questions: (i) What exactly is being validated? and (ii) what counts as a gold standard? I argue that confusion over these questions leads to systematic errors in the empirical literature. I propose an alternative approach to clinical validation motivated by reasoning by consilience. Consilience is a mode of reasoning that assigns a degree of plausibility to a hypothesis based on its fit with multiple pieces of evidence from independent sources. I argue that this approach resolves the questions raised by the orthodox approach and may be a useful framework for optimizing future clinical validation studies in the science of consciousness.
意识整体障碍的行为诊断颇具难度，诊断错误屡见不鲜。神经影像学的最新进展或许能解决这一问题。然而，神经影像学的临床转化需要临床验证。将传统的临床验证方法应用于神经影像学引发了两个关键问题：（i）究竟要验证什么？以及（ii）什么可被视为金标准？我认为，对这些问题的混淆导致了实证文献中的系统性错误。我提出一种受一致性推理启发的临床验证替代方法。一致性是一种推理模式，它根据一个假设与来自独立来源的多条证据的契合度，赋予该假设一定程度的可信度。我认为这种方法解决了传统方法提出的问题，并且可能是优化未来意识科学临床验证研究的有用框架。
