Abstract
Nancy Cartwright begins her recent book, Hunting Causes and Using Them, by noting that while a few years ago real causal claims were in dispute, nowadays “causality is back, and with a vengeance.” In the case of the social sciences, Keith Morrison writes that “Social science asks ‘why?’. Detecting causality or its corollary—prediction—is the jewel in the crown of social science research.” With respect to the health sciences, Judea Pearl writes that the “research questions that motivate most studies in the health sciences are causal in nature.” However, not all data used by people interested in making causal claims come from experiments that use random assignment to control and treatment groups. Indeed, much research in the social and health science depends on non-experimental, observational data. Thus, one of the most important problems in the social and health sciences concerns making warranted causal claims using non-experimental, observational data; viz., “Can observational data be used to make etiological inferences leading to warranted causal claims?” This paper examines one method of warranting causal claims that is especially widespread in epidemiology and the health sciences generally—the use of causal criteria. It is argued that cases of complex causation generally, and redundant causation—both causal overdetermination and causal preemption—specifically, undermine the use of such criteria to warrant causal claims.
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Notes
Russell’s exact claim was that the word ‘cause’ should be expunged from the “philosophical vocabulary” since, in his view, physics had already expunged it from their vocabulary. However, regardless of whether Russell’s assessment of physics in 1912 was correct, as noted by Wesley Salmon (1998, p. 4), nowadays, causal concepts are ubiquitous in every branch of theoretical science, in the practical disciplines and in everyday life.
Christopher Hitchcock (2003, p. 4) makes the same point, but uses cancer, smoking and stained teeth as his example, writing that “[L]ung cancer is correlated with both smoking and with stained teeth, but if we wish to avoid lung cancer, it will pay to quit smoking but not to whiten our teeth.”
Quoted in (Randall Jr. 1940, p. 220).
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Ward, A. Causal criteria and the problem of complex causation. Med Health Care and Philos 12, 333–343 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-009-9182-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-009-9182-2