Page 12 - Spring 19

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ordinary people it would have had no prominence. Moreover, as we shall see, it does not propose anything particularly new and particularly interesting. It is, however, an opportunity, not to be wasted, to discuss medicine.
The science implied
Science, in a media promotion, such as is undoubtedly that of the pact, remains implied, that is, it does not make news. It re-proposes the issue of which I will never tire: condemning and defining the opportunistic use of Science. Mind you, this concerns not only politics but also all those, including supposed or self-styled “scientists”, who pursue non-scientific ends through science, while maintaining that their interests are exclusively scientific.
Let’s be clear: it is not forbidden to use science, if it were no pharmaceutical industry could produce drugs, and doctors could not do their job. What should be prohibited is dishonest use and deception, of whatever type, through science. Those who use science are obliged to be beyond reproach. When this obligation is not respected, there is a risk of damaging science itself, or people’s trust in science.
Returning to the pact, if science is used by politics to make war on vaccines or make peace on vaccines, for me it makes no difference. In both cases, I am sure the most important reasons are those for which politics considers it advantageous, for itself, to make either war or peace.
Ontology of medicine
The “pact” proposed by Prof. Burioni is actually a rhetorical argument, specifically metonymic, because it deduces a misleading idea of medicine from a generic idea of science, therefore equally deceptive. This is visibly incorrect and as we will see very unscientific.
The “pact” refers in fact to a generic trope of science. This concept includes all the sciences that study the laws of
nature (nomothetic, or general and concrete), as well as those that study the singularities of phenomena (idiographic, or specific and unique). These are the so- called “exact” sciences, as well as the empirical and the humanistic sciences; so a cauldron.
Medicine, compared to the numerous classifications of the available sciences, is not a “normal science” like the others, (the reference is obviously to Khun) in the sense that it:
• Aspires to be a nomothetic science but in spite of that, it is inevitably idiographic,
• As nomothetic science is not an exact science but at most it is a science by approximation,
• It is not only a knowledge of nature but also a knowledge of being, and of the person, therefore incorporating ontology and philosophical knowledge,
• It is not only objectivity, and not only subjectivity, but also relationships,
• It is not only methodology, but also pragmatism and empiricism,
• It is not only nature, but also culture,
• It is not only facts, but also phenomena,
• It is not only judgment, but also consensus.
Furthermore, medicine is not a science in the sense of a single knowledge but rather a “box” (meta-knowledge) that holds together a group of knowledge, coordinated and used pragmatically both by the patient and by the doctor. It is definitely an “abnormal science”.
To infer from an idea of normal science, the postulates of an otherwise abnormal medicine, this is not a recent epistemic deception. The ontology of medicine is deducible only and exclusively from its own abnormal being, otherwise it would not be possible for it to distinguish a cell from a person.
According to the pact of Prof. Burioni the cell and the
person are indistinguishable - they are ontologically the same thing. This misunderstanding is far from irrelevant. Today none of us are able to be reduced to a cell.
The antimetaphysical crisis
The pact, which I would gladly have signed, should have been about “medicine” in our time. In our time, we are undeniably living through a crisis of medicine. More than a century ago, medicine was seen as scientific, then as an exact science, but it has revealed itself to be something entirely different.
What is in crisis today is the claim of positivistic medicine to be a metaphysical science (based on absolute knowledge). Today the crisis of medicine has a marked anti-metaphysical trait. For millions of ordinary people it is no longer an absolute science.
Even in its scientific truths, medicine always requires thought relating both to those who practice it, and to those who make use of it. Medicine is, moreover, strongly sensitive to contexts.
With the expression “exact science” we can generally mean two different definitions:
1 A science that answers any question in its field with
results that are exact, measurable, reproducible, and
expressible results in an analytical and objective way,
2 A science that, for its methodological rigor (scientific method), is able to produce results and predictions with
an accurate quantitative expression.
Medicine, unfortunately, has none of the characteristics of
an “exact science”, it is a stochastic (not simply based on probability) knowledge, which often depends on the random, the unpredictable, the singular, the contingent, the individual history, and the context, from cultural resources.
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