Causal and Diagnostic Reasoning
Stig Andur Petersen · Nordic journal of nursing research · 1990
This paper deals with the kind of reasoning which is involved in diagnosis and analysis of disease causes. Mackie's theory of singular causality is shown to be a fruitful tool for this kind of analysis. We expand this theory and discuss some issues about the nature of causal complexes (their prototypical character) and about how detailed a causul tree structure must be (the stop problem). It is argued that causal and diagnostic reasoning is driven by mental model constructions.