This talk presents the framework of the Research Group “Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences”. First, I briefly introduce the topic and scope of the group that draws on history of science and philosophy of medicine.
Our historical point of departure is the mid-19th century, when the patient and their individual illness receded behind a focus on abstract disease entities. We explore how assumptions about disease entities and the medical system formed and were formed by evaluative categories such as validity, but also specificity, sensitivity, and reliability.
An important premise of our work is to approach validity as a relational property: no test, model, or research result is valid in an absolute sense. Validity must always be understood in relation to the ways the targets of interest have been framed and the purposes driving the pursuit of knowledge. In the second part of the talk, I motivate this relational standpoint by demonstrating how it provides us with a different analytical perspective on the actors’ categories of construct validity, internal and external validity, in particular with respect to the use of these categories in biomedical research. I argue that a relational epistemology can provide us with (1) a distinctive historiographical approach to study validation practices, and (2) an alternative philosophy of medicine that does not build on ontological assumptions about disease entities.
The meeting will be held in a hybrid format, physically at Blindern (Georg Sverdrups Hus, Grupperom 4) and digitally on Zoom: https://uio.zoom.us/j/68706598468