•  52
    The Principal Principle and subjective Bayesianism
    with Christian Wallmann
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (1): 1-14. 2019.
    This paper poses a problem for Lewis’ Principal Principle in a subjective Bayesian framework: we show that, where chances inform degrees of belief, subjective Bayesianism fails to validate normal informal standards of what is reasonable. This problem points to a tension between the Principal Principle and the claim that conditional degrees of belief are conditional probabilities. However, one version of objective Bayesianism has a straightforward resolution to this problem, because it avoids thi…Read more
  •  40
    Mechanisms in clinical practice: use and justification
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 23 (1): 115-124. 2020.
    While the importance of mechanisms in determining causality in medicine is currently the subject of active debate, the role of mechanistic reasoning in clinical practice has received far less attention. In this paper we look at this question in the context of the treatment of a particular individual, and argue that evidence of mechanisms is indeed key to various aspects of clinical practice, including assessing population-level research reports, diagnostic as well as therapeutic decision making,…Read more
  • Introduction
    with Beth Shaw, Federica Russo, Charles Norell, Michael Kelly, Phyllis Illari, Brendan Clarke, Michael Wilde, Christian Wallmann, and Veli-Pekka Parkkinen
    In Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, Christian Wallmann, Michael Wilde, Brendan Clarke, Phyllis Illari, Michael P. Kelly, Charles Norell, Federica Russo, Beth Shaw & Jon Williamson (eds.), Evaluating evidence of mechanisms in medicine, Springer. 2018.
  • How to Consider Evidence of Mechanisms: An Overview
    with Beth Shaw, Federica Russo, Charles Norell, Michael Kelly, Phyllis Illari, Brendan Clarke, Michael Wilde, Christian Wallmann, and Veli-Pekka Parkkinen
    In Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, Christian Wallmann, Michael Wilde, Brendan Clarke, Phyllis Illari, Michael P. Kelly, Charles Norell, Federica Russo, Beth Shaw & Jon Williamson (eds.), Evaluating evidence of mechanisms in medicine, Springer. 2018.
  • Assessing Exposures
    with Beth Shaw, Federica Russo, Charles Norell, Michael Kelly, Phyllis Illari, Brendan Clarke, Michael Wilde, Christian Wallmann, and Veli-Pekka Parkkinen
    In Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, Christian Wallmann, Michael Wilde, Brendan Clarke, Phyllis Illari, Michael P. Kelly, Charles Norell, Federica Russo, Beth Shaw & Jon Williamson (eds.), Evaluating evidence of mechanisms in medicine, Springer. 2018.
  • Particularisation to an Individual
    with Beth Shaw, Federica Russo, Charles Norell, Michael Kelly, Phyllis Illari, Brendan Clarke, Michael Wilde, Christian Wallmann, and Veli-Pekka Parkkinen
    In Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, Christian Wallmann, Michael Wilde, Brendan Clarke, Phyllis Illari, Michael P. Kelly, Charles Norell, Federica Russo, Beth Shaw & Jon Williamson (eds.), Evaluating evidence of mechanisms in medicine, Springer. 2018.
  • Tools
    with Beth Shaw, Federica Russo, Charles Norell, Michael Kelly, Phyllis Illari, Brendan Clarke, Michael Wilde, Christian Wallmann, Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, and Michael P. Kelly
    In Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, Christian Wallmann, Michael Wilde, Brendan Clarke, Phyllis Illari, Michael P. Kelly, Charles Norell, Federica Russo, Beth Shaw & Jon Williamson (eds.), Evaluating evidence of mechanisms in medicine, Springer. 2018.
  •  89
    Evaluating evidence of mechanisms in medicine
    with Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, Christian Wallmann, Michael Wilde, Brendan Clarke, Phyllis Illari, Michael P. Kelly, Charles Norell, Federica Russo, and Beth Shaw
    Springer. 2018.
    The use of evidence in medicine is something we should continuously seek to improve. This book seeks to develop our understanding of evidence of mechanism in evaluating evidence in medicine, public health, and social care; and also offers tools to help implement improved assessment of evidence of mechanism in practice. In this way, the book offers a bridge between more theoretical and conceptual insights and worries about evidence of mechanism and practical means to fit the results into evidence…Read more
  •  7
    Table 4 in original article has been corrected.
  •  59
    Establishing the teratogenicity of Zika and evaluating causal criteria
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 10): 2505-2518. 2018.
    The teratogenicity of the Zika virus was considered established in 2016, and is an interesting case because three different sets of causal criteria were used to assess teratogenicity. This paper appeals to the thesis of Russo and Williamson (2007) to devise an epistemological framework that can be used to compare and evaluate sets of causal criteria. The framework can also be used to decide when enough criteria are satisfied to establish causality. Arguably, the three sets of causal criteria con…Read more
  •  43
    The use of evidence of mechanisms in drug approval
    with Jeffrey Aronson, Adam La Caze, Michael Kelly, and Veli-Pekka Parkkinen
    Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. forthcoming.
    The role of mechanistic evidence tends to be under-appreciated in current evidencebased medicine (EBM), which focusses on clinical studies, tending to restrict attention to randomized controlled studies (RCTs) when they are available. The EBM+ programme seeks to redress this imbalance, by suggesting methods for evaluating mechanistic studies alongside clinical studies. Drug approval is a problematic case for the view that mechanistic evidence should be taken into account, because RCTs are almost…Read more
  •  29
  •  27
    Models in Systems Medicine
    Disputatio 9 (47): 429-469. 2017.
    Systems medicine is a promising new paradigm for discovering associations, causal relationships and mechanisms in medicine. But it faces some tough challenges that arise from the use of big data: in particular, the problem of how to integrate evidence and the problem of how to structure the development of models. I argue that objective Bayesian models offer one way of tackling the evidence integration problem. I also offer a general methodology for structuring the development of models, within w…Read more
  •  20
    Models in medicine
    In Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine, Routledge. 2016.
  •  8
    Review of Lorenzo Magnani: 'Abduction, Reason and Science: Processes of Discovery and Explanation' (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (2): 353-358. 2003.
  •  63
    Justifying the principle of indifference
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3): 559-586. 2018.
    This paper presents a new argument for the Principle of Indifference. This argument can be thought of in two ways: as a pragmatic argument, justifying the principle as needing to hold if one is to minimise worst-case expected loss, or as an epistemic argument, justifying the principle as needing to hold in order to minimise worst-case expected inaccuracy. The question arises as to which interpretation is preferable. I show that the epistemic argument contradicts Evidentialism and suggest that th…Read more
  •  51
    Justifying the Principle of Indifference
    European Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
    This paper presents a new argument for the Principle of Indifference. This argument can be thought of in two ways: as a pragmatic argument, justifying the principle as needing to hold if one is to minimise worst-case expected loss, or as an epistemic argument, justifying the principle as needing to hold in order to minimise worst-case expected inaccuracy. The question arises as to which interpretation is preferable. I show that the epistemic argument contradicts Evidentialism and suggest that th…Read more
  •  50
    Explication
    The Philosophers' Magazine 50 (50): 114-115. 2010.
  •  107
    Establishing Causal Claims in Medicine
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 32 (1): 33-61. 2019.
    Russo and Williamson put forward the following thesis: in order to establish a causal claim in medicine, one normally needs to establish both that the putative cause and putative effect are appropriately correlated and that there is some underlying mechanism that can account for this correlation. I argue that, although the Russo-Williamson thesis conflicts with the tenets of present-day evidence-based medicine, it offers a better causal epistemology than that provided by present-day EBM because …Read more
  •  38
    Intervention and Identifiability in Latent Variable Modelling
    Minds and Machines 28 (2): 243-264. 2018.
    We consider the use of interventions for resolving a problem of unidentified statistical models. The leading examples are from latent variable modelling, an influential statistical tool in the social sciences. We first explain the problem of statistical identifiability and contrast it with the identifiability of causal models. We then draw a parallel between the latent variable models and Bayesian networks with hidden nodes. This allows us to clarify the use of interventions for dealing with uni…Read more
  •  31
    Maximum Entropy Applied to Inductive Logic and Reasoning (edited book)
    Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. 2015.
    This editorial explains the scope of the special issue and provides a thematic introduction to the contributed papers.
  •  24
    Causality in the Sciences (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2011.
    Why do ideas of how mechanisms relate to causality and probability differ so much across the sciences? Can progress in understanding the tools of causal inference in some sciences lead to progress in others? This book tackles these questions and others concerning the use of causality in the sciences.
  •  57
    The Recursive Bayesian Net formalism was originally developed for modelling nested causal relationships. In this paper we argue that the formalism can also be applied to modelling the hierarchical structure of mechanisms. The resulting network contains quantitative information about probabilities, as well as qualitative information about mechanistic structure and causal relations. Since information about probabilities, mechanisms and causal relations is vital for prediction, explanation and cont…Read more
  •  40
    Probabilistic Logic and Probabilistic Networks
    with R. Haenni, J.-W. Romeijn, and G. Wheeler
    While in principle probabilistic logics might be applied to solve a range of problems, in practice they are rarely applied at present. This is perhaps because they seem disparate, complicated, and computationally intractable. However, we shall argue in this programmatic paper that several approaches to probabilistic logic into a simple unifying framework: logically complex evidence can be used to associate probability intervals or probabilities with sentences.
  •  106
    This chapter addresses two questions: what are causal relationships? how can one discover causal relationships? I provide a survey of the principal answers given to these questions, followed by an introduction to my own view, epistemic causality, and then a comparison of epistemic causality with accounts provided by Judea Pearl and Huw Price.
  •  103
    Kyburg goes half-way towards objective Bayesianism. He accepts that frequencies constrain rational belief to an interval but stops short of isolating an optimal degree of belief within this interval. I examine the case for going the whole hog.
  •  51
    This introduction to the volume begins with a manifesto that puts forward two theses: first, that the sciences are the best place to turn in order to understand causality; second, that scientifically-informed philosophical investigation can bring something to the sciences too. Next, the chapter goes through the various parts of the volume, drawing out relevant background and themes of the chapters in those parts. Finally, the chapter discusses the progeny of the papers and identifies some next step…Read more