Prediction: nonsense or hope?
Psychiatry and psychopharmacology are no longer aiming to make a decisive breakthrough at the end of the century. Rather than seeking explanations, research workers are looking for 'predictions'. Three main types of prediction are emerging: a tautological, a heuristic, and an irrelevant one. Few predictions found in the recent literature can be marked as 'logical' ones. Nevertheless, predictions play two important roles: they generate new hypotheses that can be falsified in properly designed scientific experiments; they also may serve to falsify given hypotheses. The main recent findings on predictions in psychiatry are briefly summarised.
Höschl
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3rd School of Medicine, Charles University, Praha, Czech Republic.
D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000188:drug therapy*; D011336:Probability; D011570:Psychiatry; D011600:Psychopharmacology