•  88
    Crossing the road within the traffic system is an example of an action human agents perform successfully day-to-day in complex systems. How do they perform such successful actions given that the behaviour of complex systems is often difficult to predict? The contemporary literature contains two contrasting approaches to the epistemology of complex systems: an analytic and a post-modern approach. We argue that neither approach adequately accounts for how successful action is possible in complex s…Read more
  •  20
    The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Public Health is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising over forty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook covers the following central topics: What is global health?; methodology in public health science; social determinants and health equity; politics and economics; health policy and law; globalization; macroeconomics; securitization; and specific public health c…Read more
  •  6
  •  382
    Evolution and Epistemic Justification
    Dialectica 69 (2): 185-203. 2015.
    According to the evolutionary sceptic, the fact that our cognitive faculties evolved radically undermines their reliability. A number of evolutionary epistemologists have sought to refute this kind of scepticism. This paper accepts the success of these attempts, yet argues that refuting the evolutionary sceptic is not enough to put any particular domain of beliefs – notably scientific beliefs, which include belief in Darwinian evolution – on a firm footing. The paper thus sets out to contribute …Read more
  •  2
    Philosophy of epidemiology
    Palgrave-Macmillan. 2013.
    Epidemiology is one of the fastest growing and increasingly important sciences. This thorough analysis lays out the conceptual foundations of epidemiology, identifying traps and setting out the benefits of properly understanding this fascinating and important discipline, as well as providing the means to do so.
  •  31
    Philosophy of Medicine and Covid-19
    Philosophy of Medicine 3 (1). 2022.
    The Covid-19 pandemic was a world event on our intellectual doorstep. What were our duties to respond, and how well did we respond? We published papers, but we did not engage extensively or influentially in public debate. Perhaps we felt we were not experts. Yet in a health crisis, philosophers of medicine can offer not only “conceptual clarification,” but also domain-specific knowledge concerning structural properties of relevant sciences and their social-political uses. I set out three conditi…Read more
  • Philosophy of epidemiology
    In Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine, Routledge. 2016.
  •  3
    "In comparison to medicine, the professional field of public health is far less familiar. What is public health, and perhaps as importantly, what should public health be or become? How do causal concepts shape the public health agenda? How do study designs either promote or demote the environmental causal factors or health inequalities? How is risk understood, expressed, and communicated? Who is public health research centered on? How can we develop technologies so the benefits are more fairly d…Read more
  •  12
    Philosophy of Medicine
    with Jonathan Fuller
    Philosophy of Medicine 1 (1). 2020.
  •  19
    This paper argues that machine learning and epidemiology are on collision course over causation. The discipline of epidemiology lays great emphasis on causation, while ML research does not. Some epidemiologists have proposed imposing what amounts to a causal constraint on ML in epidemiology, requiring it either to engage in causal inference or restrict itself to mere projection. We whittle down the issues to the question of whether causal knowledge is necessary for underwriting predictions about…Read more
  •  1
    Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Medicine (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  •  45
    Causation
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020.
    Causation The question, “What is causation?” may sound like a trivial question—it is as sure as common knowledge can ever be that some things cause another; that there are causes and they necessitate certain effects. We say that we know that what caused the president’s death was an assassin’s shot. But when asked why, we … Continue reading Causation →
  •  7
    Disease as a Theoretical Concept: The Case of HPV-It Is
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48 250-257. 2014.
    If there is any value in the idea that disease is something other than the mere absence of health then that value must lie in the way that diseases are classified. This paper offers further development of a view advanced previously, the 'contrastive model' of disease: it develops the account to handle asymptomatic disease ; and in doing so it relates the model to a broadly biostatistical view of health. The developments are prompted by considering cancers featuring viruses as prominent causes, s…Read more
  •  1
    When graduate students start their studies, they usually have sound knowledge of some areas of philosophy, but the overall map of their knowledge is often patchy and disjointed. There are a number of topics that any contemporary philosopher working in any part of the analytic tradition needs to grasp, and to grasp as a coherent whole rather than a rag-bag of interesting but isolated discussions. This book answers this need, by providing a overview of core topics in metaphysics and epistemology t…Read more
  •  43
    Philosophy of Medicine
    Oup Usa. 2018.
    Philosophy of Medicine provides a fresh and comprehensive treatment of the topic. It offers a novel theory of the nature of medicine, and proposes a new attitude to medicine, aimed at improving the quality of debates between medical traditions and facilitating medicine's decolonization.
  •  29
    The C-word, the P-word, and realism in epidemiology
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 10): 2613-2628. 2019.
    This paper considers an important recent contribution by Miguel Hernán to the ongoing debate about causal inference in epidemiology. Hernán rejects the idea that there is an in-principle epistemic distinction between the results of randomized controlled trials and observational studies: both produce associations which we may be more or less confident interpreting as causal. However, Hernán maintains that trials have a semantic advantage. Observational studies that seek to estimate causal effect …Read more
  •  43
    Prediction, Understanding, and Medicine
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 43 (3): 289-305. 2018.
    What is medicine? One obvious answer in the context of the contemporary clinical tradition is that medicine is the process of curing sick people. However, this “curative thesis” is not satisfactory, even when “cure” is defined generously and even when exceptions such as cosmetic surgery are set aside. Historian of medicine Roy Porter argues that the position of medicine in society has had, and still has, little to do with its ability to make people better. Moreover, the efficacy of medicine for …Read more
  •  16
    This article is a reply to two critics of my “Prediction, Understanding, and Medicine,” published elsewhere in this journal issue. In that essay, I argued that medicine is best understood not as essentially a curative enterprise, but rather as one essentially oriented towards prediction and understanding. Here, I defend this position from several criticisms made of it.
  •  71
    Health as a Secondary Property
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (2): 609-627. 2019.
    In the literature on health, naturalism and normativism are typically characterized as espousing and rejecting, respectively, the view that health is objective and value-free. This article points out that there are two distinct dimensions of disagreement, regarding objectivity and value-ladenness, and thus arranges naturalism and normativism as diagonal opposites on a two-by-two matrix of possible positions. One of the remaining quadrants is occupied by value-dependent realism, holding that heal…Read more
  •  13
    For analytic bioethics
    Clinical Ethics 3 (4): 185-188. 2008.
    This paper argues that bioethics requires analysis, which is not explicitly ethical in character. The first part of the paper argues the general point, that ethical problems can arise not only on occasions when moral values make conflicting recommendations, but also in understanding the facts. I suggest that this is particularly so where the facts are provided by the biomedical sciences, since it is often not clear how to relate their conceptual framework to that in which we frame our value judg…Read more
  •  2275
    Inferring causation in epidemiology: mechanisms, black boxes, and contrasts
    In Phyllis McKay Illari, Federica Russo & Jon Williamson (eds.), Causality in the Sciences, Oxford University Press. pp. 45--69. 2011.
    This chapter explores the idea that causal inference is warranted if and only if the mechanism underlying the inferred causal association is identified. This mechanistic stance is discernible in the epidemiological literature, and in the strategies adopted by epidemiologists seeking to establish causal hypotheses. But the exact opposite methodology is also discernible, the black box stance, which asserts that epidemiologists can and should make causal inferences on the basis of their evidence, w…Read more
  •  107
    The difference between cause and condition
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 (1pt3): 355-364. 2008.
    Commonly we distinguish the strike of a match, as a cause of the match lighting, from the presence of oxygen, as a mere condition. In this paper I propose an account of this phenomenon, which I call causal selection. I suggest some reasons for taking causal selection seriously, and indicate some shortcomings of the popular contrastive approach. Chief among these is the lack of an account of contrast choice. I propose that contrast choice is often just the counterfactual scenario in which the eff…Read more
  •  988
    Causes of causes
    Philosophical Studies 158 (3): 457-476. 2012.
    When is a cause of a cause of an effect also a cause of that effect? The right answer is either Sometimes or Always . In favour of Always , transitivity is considered by some to be necessary for distinguishing causes from redundant non-causal events. Moreover transitivity may be motivated by an interest in an unselective notion of causation, untroubled by principles of invidious discrimination. And causal relations appear to add up like transitive relations, so that the obtaining of the overarch…Read more
  •  1806
    Fact and Law in the Causal Inquiry
    Legal Theory 15 (3): 173-191. 2009.
    This paper takes it as a premise that a distinction between matters of fact and of law is important in the causal inquiry. But it argues that separating factual and legal causation as different elements of liability is not the best way to implement the fact/law distinction. What counts as a cause-in-fact is partly a legal question; and certain liability-limiting doctrines under the umbrella of “legal causation” depend on the application of factual-causal concepts. The contrastive account of fact…Read more
  •  1943
    Prediction in epidemiology and medicine
    with Jonathan Fuller and Luis J. Flores
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. 2015.
  •  31
    Disease as a theoretical concept: The case of “HPV-itis”
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48 250-257. 2014.
  •  9
    When graduate students start their studies, they usually have sound knowledge of some areas of philosophy, but the overall map of their knowledge is often patchy and disjointed. There are a number of topics that any contemporary philosopher working in any part of the analytic tradition needs to grasp, and to grasp as a coherent whole rather than a rag-bag of interesting but isolated discussions. This book answers this need, by providing a overview of core topics in metaphysics and epistemology t…Read more