JRC for Logic
Tsinghua University – University of Amsterdam Joint Research Centre for Logic
JRC for Logic
Tsinghua University – University of Amsterdam Joint Research Centre for Logic

Tsing Ch’a Sessions 清茶会

To promote interdisciplinary interaction between different faculty members and students on the campus, a weekly meeting has been organized by our postdoc Jialiang Yan since September 2023, called Tsing Ch’a Sessions (清茶会). Its slogan “know thyself and let others know you better.”

■Current Sessions

Recent advances in the understanding of the micro-physiological mechanisms underlying carcinogenesis have increased the importance of personalized reasoning and decision-making in clinical oncology. In this rapidly evolving context, the purpose of personalized cancer medicine is to counterbalance standardization in patient care by tailoring and adapting interventions to individual clinical histories and therapeutic preferences of each patient. It is perhaps surprising, then, that models for personalized decision-analysis under limited evidence are still mostly confined to econometrics, while similarly methodologically justified approaches to integrate and evaluate evidence in clinical decision-making remain comparatively underused.
Starting from a basic template for decision-making in cancer treatment, this presentation frames and discusses some of the main methodological challenges to manage evidence and uncertainty in personalized oncology. Particular attention will be devoted to clinical decisions in which guideline-based procedures must be combined with patient-specific features emerging from multiomic clinical records. This approach thus departs from evidencebased medicine, which tends to evaluate the effectiveness of medical interventions through fixed epistemic hierarchies privileging the use of randomized controlled trials and metaanalyses.
The proposed framework combines a substantive account of how clinical evidence is generated with the assessment of effectiveness hypotheses in rare cancers.

About the speaker: Giovanni Sanavio a third year Ph.D. candidate conducting his research within the “Reasoning with Data” (ReDa) group based at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan, and part of the joint doctoral program “HuME” shared with IUSS Pavia and the SNS of Pisa. His research has thus far focused on clinical reasoning, evidence evaluation and belief revision for bed-side decision making. More generally, his interests include philosophy of science and medicine, formal epistemology and inductive logic.

In his 1996 doctoral thesis, Maurice Pagnucco introduced the first AGM-like abductive expansion operation. Building on his operation, together with a taxonomy—inspired by Atocha Aliseda—that serves to highlight and formalize the main components of abductive reasoning, the main aim of this presentation is to introduce a new paraconsistent AGM-like abductive expansion operation—capable of assimilating contradictory explanatory hypotheses without leading to trivialization and the resulting absurd epistemic state—, with its postulates and its transitively relational partial meet construction. To a large extent, the formal development we will present was only made possible by the recent creation of the paraconsistent logic RCbr, by Marcelo E. Coniglio, Martin Figallo and Rafael R. Testa, an LFI (Logics of Formal Inconsistencies) that establishes properties especially relevant to belief revision contexts, in particular, the ability to be self-extensional—i.e., to satisfy the replacement property.

The transitively relational partial meet abductive expansion operation introduced in this talk is part of a system called AGM_{p_{abd}}. Despite not assigning, in the postulates and construction, any relevant epistemic role to the paraconsistent operators of negation \neg and consistency \circ, this operation is, to the best of my knowledge, the first of its kind in the AGM literature.

 ■Past Sessions

Click HERE to check the past sessions from 2020-2024.

Click HERE to check the past sessions from 2025.