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38Mechanisms in clinical practice: use and justificationMedicine, 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
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87Evaluating evidence of mechanisms in medicineSpringer. 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
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7Correction to: Establishing the teratogenicity of Zika and evaluating causal criteriaSynthese 198 (Suppl 10): 2519-2519. 2018.Table 4 in original article has been corrected.
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56Establishing the teratogenicity of Zika and evaluating causal criteriaSynthese 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
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8From bayesianism to the epistemic view of mathematics: Richard Jeffrey. Subjective probability: The real thing. Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2004. Isbn 0-521-82971-2 , 0-521-53668-5 . Pp. XVI + 124 (review)Philosophia Mathematica 14 (3): 365-369. 2006.
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43The use of evidence of mechanisms in drug approvalJournal 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
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19Models in medicineIn Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine, Routledge. 2016.
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25Models in Systems MedicineDisputatio 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
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8Review 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.
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63Justifying the principle of indifferenceEuropean 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
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51Justifying the Principle of IndifferenceEuropean 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
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98Establishing Causal Claims in MedicineInternational 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
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38Intervention and Identifiability in Latent Variable ModellingMinds 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
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27Maximum 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.
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22Causality 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.
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53Models for Prediction, Explanation and Control: Recursive Bayesian NetworksTheoria 26 (1): 5-33. 2011.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
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158From Bayesian epistemology to inductive logicJournal of Applied Logic 11 (4): 468-486. 2013.Inductive logic admits a variety of semantics (Haenni et al., 2011, Part 1). This paper develops semantics based on the norms of Bayesian epistemology (Williamson, 2010, Chapter 7). §1 introduces the semantics and then, in §2, the paper explores methods for drawing inferences in the resulting logic and compares the methods of this paper with the methods of Barnett and Paris (2008). §3 then evaluates this Bayesian inductive logic in the light of four traditional critiques of inductive logic, argu…Read more
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Probabilistic TheoriesIn Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock & Peter Menzies (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Causation, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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1According to objective Bayesianism, an agent’s degrees of belief should be determined by a probability function, out of all those that satisfy constraints imposed by background knowledge, that maximises entropy. A Bayesian net offers a way of efficiently representing a probability function and efficiently drawing inferences from that function. An objective Bayesian net is a Bayesian net representation of the maximum entropy probability function. In this paper we apply the machinery of objective …Read more
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148Causal Pluralism versus Epistemic CausalityPhilosophica 77 (1): 69-96. 2006.It is tempting to analyse causality in terms of just one of the indicators of causal relationships, e.g., mechanisms, probabilistic dependencies or independencies, counterfactual conditionals or agency considerations. While such an analysis will surely shed light on some aspect of our concept of cause, it will fail to capture the whole, rather multifarious, notion. So one might instead plump for pluralism: a different analysis for a different occasion. But we do not seem to have lots of differen…Read more
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85I present a formalism that combines two methodologies: objective Bayesianism and Bayesian nets. According to objective Bayesianism, an agent’s degrees of belief (i) ought to satisfy the axioms of probability, (ii) ought to satisfy constraints imposed by background knowledge, and (iii) should otherwise be as non-committal as possible (i.e. have maximum entropy). Bayesian nets offer an efficient way of representing and updating probability functions. An objective Bayesian net is a Bayesian net rep…Read more
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97In Defence of ActivitiesJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 44 (1): 69-83. 2013.In this paper, we examine what is to be said in defence of Machamer, Darden and Craver’s (MDC) controversial dualism about activities and entities (Machamer, Darden and Craver’s in Philos Sci 67:1–25, 2000). We explain why we believe the notion of an activity to be a novel, valuable one, and set about clearing away some initial objections that can lead to its being brushed aside unexamined. We argue that substantive debate about ontology can only be effective when desiderata for an ontology are …Read more
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25By identifying and pursuing analogies between causal and logical influence I show how the Bayesian network formalism can be applied to reasoning about logical deductions.
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1550Recommended citation: . . Link¨ oping Electronic Articles in Computer and Information Science, Vol. 7(2002): nr 0. http://www.ep.liu.se/ea/cis/2002/00/. September 18, 2002.
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57Foundations of Bayesianism (edited book)Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2001.The volume includes important criticisms of Bayesian reasoning and also gives an insight into some of the points of disagreement amongst advocates of the ...
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146Imaging Technology and the Philosophy of CausalityPhilosophy and Technology 24 (2): 115-136. 2011.Russo and Williamson (Int Stud Philos Sci 21(2):157–170, 2007) put forward the thesis that, at least in the health sciences, to establish the claim that C is a cause of E, one normally needs evidence of an underlying mechanism linking C and E as well as evidence that C makes a difference to E. This epistemological thesis poses a problem for most current analyses of causality which, in virtue of analysing causality in terms of just one of mechanisms or difference making, cannot account for the ne…Read more