Abstract
Establishing causal relations is a core enterprise of the medical sciences. Understanding the etiology of diseases, and the treatments to reduce the burden of disease, is in fact an instantiation of the very many activities related to causal analysis and causal assessment in medical science. In medicine, correlations have a “Janus” character. On the one hand, we should beware of correlations as they do not imply causation – a well-established “mantra” in statistics and in the philosophy of causality. On the other hand, correlations are a very important and useful piece of evidence in order to establish causal relations – a line of argument that is currently debated in the philosophical and medical literature. Understanding the limits and potentialities of correlations in medicine is all the more important if we consider the emergence of a “data-intensive science” when the search for correlations in big data sets is becoming key in the medical sciences.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
Bernard C (1856) An introduction to the study of experimental medicine, 1927th edn. Macmillan, New York
Brendan C, Gillies D, Illari P, Russo F, Williamson J (2014) Mechanisms and the evidence hierarchy. Topoi 33:339–360. doi:10.1007/s11245-013-9220-9, Online first
Broadbent A (2011) Inferring causation in epidemiology: mechanisms, black boxes, and contrasts. In: Illari PMK, Russo F, Williamson J (eds) Causality in the sciences. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 45–69
Cook TD, Campbell DT (1979) Quasi-experimentation. Design and analysis issues for field settings. Rand MacNally, Chicago
Frumkin Howard (2006) Causation in medicine. http://www.aoec.org/CEEM/methods/emory2.html
Gillies D (2011) The Russo-Williamson thesis and the question of whether smoking causes heart disease. In: Illari PMK, Russo F, Williamson J (eds) Causality in the sciences. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 110–125
Good IJ (1961a) A causal calculus I. Br J Philos Sci 11:305–318
Good IJ (1961b) A causal calculus II. Br J Philos Sci 12:43–51
Goyal R (2013) Narration in medicine. In: Pier J, Schmid W, Hühn P, Meister JC (eds) The living handbook of narratology. Hamburg University, Hamburg, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narration-medicine
Hill BA (1965) The environment of disease: association or causation? Proc R Soc Med 58:295–300
Illari PMK (2011) Mechanistic evidence: disambiguating the Russo-Williamson thesis. Int Stud Philos Sci 25(2):139–157
Illari P, Russo F (2014) Causality: philosophical theory meets scientific practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Leonelli S (2015) What counts as scientific data? A relational framework. Philos Sci 82:1–12
Lipton R, Ødegaard T (2005) Causal thinking and causal language in epidemiology. Epidemiol Perspect Innovat 2:8, http://www.epi-perspectives.com/content/2/1/8
Merelli I, Pérez-Sánchez H, Gesing S, D’Agostino D (2014) High-performance computing and big data in omics-based medicine. BioMed Res Int 825649. doi:10.1155/2014/825649
Nissen T, Wynn R (2012) The recent history of the clinical case report: a narrative review. RSM Short Rep 3(12):87. doi:10.1258/shorts.2012.012046
Parascandola M, Weed DL (2001) Causation in epidemiology. J Epidemiol Community Health 55:905–912
Reiss J (2015) Causation, evidence, and inference. Routledge, New York
Russo F, Williamson J (2007) Interpreting causality in the health sciences. Int Stud Philos Sci 21(2):157–170
Russo F, Williamson J (2011a) Epistemic causality and evidence-based medicine. Hist Philos Life Sci 33:563–582, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/8351
Russo F, Williamson J (2011b) Generic vs. single-case causal knowledge. The case of autopsy. Eur J Philos Sci 1(1):47–69
Suppes P (1970) A probabilistic theory of causality. North-Holland, Amsterdam
Williamson J (2005) Bayesian nets and causality: philosophical and computational foundations. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this entry
Cite this entry
Russo, F. (2015). Causation and Correlation in Medical Science: Theoretical Problems. In: Schramme, T., Edwards, S. (eds) Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8706-2_46-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8706-2_46-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-8706-2
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities