Connections With Logical Principles
The logical roots of the Holmes remark speak to the principle of excluded middle. That indicates the importance to case analysis of logical disjunction: stringing together propositions with the logical connective "or". Medical diagnosis can indeed follow the Holmes pattern, with a patient's symptom possibly caused by a number of conditions: the patient suffers from A or B or ... or illness I; see differential diagnosis. Deductive logic is applied to reducing the number of cases; see case-based reasoning.
A canonical statement of case analysis in the sentential calculus is:
"If a statement P implies a statement Q, and a statement R also implies Q, and either P or R is true, then Q must be true."
Read more about this topic: Case Analysis
Famous quotes containing the words connections, logical and/or principles:
“... feminism is a political term and it must be recognized as such: it is political in women’s terms. What are these terms? Essentially it means making connections: between personal power and economic power, between domestic oppression and labor exploitation, between plants and chemicals, feelings and theories; it means making connections between our inside worlds and the outside world.”
—Anica Vesel Mander, U.S. author and feminist, and Anne Kent Rush (b. 1945)
“It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say “that is red” instead of “that reddens,” either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“That, upon the whole, we may conclude that the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)