Las predicciones epidemiológicas bajo la concepción del “insight”de Bernard Lonergan

Resumen

Epidemiological predictions view under the idea of b. Lonergan’s “insight”

This article explores in which sense it can be assigned some probability to the occurrence of an epidemic. It is based on what B. Lonergan explains in chapters 2, 3 and 4 of his book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, as well as on what Philip McShane, his pupil, posits in Randomness, Statistics and Emergence. First, there’s a report on the epidemics of an infectious disease, its stages, and the relationship with the infectious agent. The text highlights the difference between systematic and non-systematic processes, and concludes that an epidemic is one of the latter, where chance and emergent probability play a fundamental role. Some methods are mentioned that can be used to estimate and verify the occurrence of a non-systematic event, an epidemic in this case. To do so, a distinction should be made between the probability of the event (p-f) and that such probability is true (p-v). It is concluded that the probability cannot be verified, therefore any probabilistic assignation falls under what Lonergan calls “generalized uncertainty principle.”

Key words. Probability, epidemiology, systematic process, non-systematic process, meaning, Lonergan, McShanne, verification, prediction.