医学AI解释需融合因果、信任与实际需求,才能真正有用。
Scientific Explanations in Health Sciences: Causality, Trust, and Epistemic Adequacy
- 从科学哲学视角重构医疗AI解释标准
- 提出因果性、信任与实用性三维度评估框架
- 适合关注AI临床落地的医生与研究者阅读
医学人工智能(AI)有望改变临床实践,但许多机器学习(ML)模型的决策过程仍不透明。可解释性被视作缓解此问题的部分方案,尤其在高风险场景中。然而,何为充分的医学解释仍存在争议。事实上,这一议题在科学哲学与医学领域已有长期探讨,却未被当代可解释人工智能(XAI)研究充分吸收,导致其基础假设缺乏深入审视。本文通过整合科学哲学与XAI的交叉研究,系统分析健康科学中解释的主流观点,评估其对医疗XAI的适用性,主张这些思想构成哲学基础上解释性的必要条件。基于此,论文提出三个核心分析维度:医学推理中的因果作用、医学信任的认知与关系维度,以及由多元利益相关方的实用需求所决定的解释充分性标准。通过融合哲学分析与医疗AI进展,本文构建了设计更可靠、契合临床实际的XAI系统的原则,推动医疗XAI讨论回归未被充分探索的概念基础。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely expected to transform clinical practice, yet the decision-making processes of many Machine Learning (ML) models remain opaque. Explainability has been advanced as a partial remedy to clarify why AI generates predictions, particularly in high-stakes contexts. Despite ongoing efforts, debates on what constitutes an adequate medical explanation remain unsettled. Yet, explanation has long been a central topic of inquiry in the philosophy of science and medicine. The insights developed in these fields, however, have been largely overlooked in contemporary explainable AI (XAI) research, leaving its foundational assumptions insufficiently examined. To address this gap, this paper develops a critical review at the intersection of philosophy of science and XAI. It examines prevailing accounts of what counts as an explanation in the health sciences and assesses their adequacy for informing XAI in medicine, arguing that they provide necessary conditions for a philosophically grounded approach to explainability in this domain. Building on this foundational philosophical literature, the discussion identifies three central axes of analysis: the role of causality in medical reasoning, the epistemic and relational dimensions of medical trust, and the criteria of explanatory adequacy as shaped by the pragmatic needs of diverse stakeholders. By integrating philosophical analysis with current developments in medical AI, the paper outlines principles for designing XAI systems that offer explanations that are not only epistemically robust but also aligned with the epistemic and practical requirements of clinical decision-making, shaping ongoing debates in medical XAI toward underexplored conceptual foundations.
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