Doctor's guess

The art of medicine is not possible without the doctor's insight. It continually directs the doctor's thought, his actions in diagnosis, diagnostic control of treatment. The modern doctor must imagine the nature, the essence of guessing in a complex, profound, stage-by-stage process of cognition. V.I. Dahl pointed out that a hunch is not only an opinion, a judgment, an assumption. It is also a penetration into the meaning, the essence of the object (process, phenomenon). In different doctrines - from empiricism and pragmatism to irrationalism and conventionalism - the essence of a guess is interpreted in different ways: as an "insight from above," the consequence of a "useful" or "purely volitional" act, a "short-circuit" in consciousness ("symptom - disease"), or some "gentleman's agreement" about "disease terms," sometimes as a "takeoff of thought for the moment" (ad hoc) or as the outcome of the operativist premise that "things are our constructions." Such positions are close to the Freudian "hidden, unconscious principle of creativity," Bergson's "instinct of cognition," and the "concentration of cognition in sensuality" inherent in Feuerbach's philosophy. Some scholars try to identify guesswork and a form of irrationalism, intuitionism. Intuitivists (and naitivists) themselves declare "illumination from above," "nativity" as the only way of cognition and not only in its early stages. All this penetrates into medical journalism, memoirism, medical consciousness.