Epistemology seminar

Speaker: Rani Lill Anjum (Norwegian University of Life Sciences)

Title: Causation and Scientific Methods in Medicine and Beyond

Abstract: The ideal of a metaphysics-free science is very much alive, and can be seen in the growing emphasis on so-called evidence-based approaches. Originating in medicine, this trend explicitly favours quantitative over qualitative methods, and large-scale observation data over theories of causal mechanisms. But what motivates the choice of one scientific method over another? And what justifies the claim that some methods are better for uncovering causation than others?Scientists need to get their hands dirty with ontology. Science cannot be free from ontology, nor should this be an ideal. Instead, scientists ought to be aware of which philosophical assumptions they are making when designing their own studies. In our forthcoming book, Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery (OUP 2018), Mumford and I argue that all scientific methods carry with them some commitment about the nature of causation. A problem with this is that different methods are motivated by different notions of causation, which means that they might give diverging results. So which should we trust?

In this talk, I will show how philosophy and science are interconnected in their endeavours to understand causation, whether theoretically or empirically. My aim is to argue that the positivist metaphysics-free ideal, with its heavy influence from Hume, ought to be replaced with a different philosophical framework, better suited to deal with the messy, real-life causal phenomena with which we are concerned. I will use medicine as my main example.