Abstract
How do we establish singular causal claims? It seems we do this all the time, from courtrooms to cloud chambers. Nevertheless, there is a strong lobby in the evidence-based medicine and policy movements that argues that we cannot make reliable causal judgments about single cases in these areas. So we cannot tell whether a policy or treatment ‘worked’ for any specific individual. This paper argues the contrary. It provides a catalogue of evidence types that can support singular causal claims, and it develops a theoretical framework that shows that these types are evidence for causation in the single case.
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Notes
- 1.
This idea is widespread not just in the evidence-based medicine and policy movements but also among philosophers. Tim Maudlin (2002, p. 143) for instance claims that, “When we think we know a cause of some event, we typically assent to the corresponding Hume counterfactual”, where the ‘Hume counterfactual’ corresponding to the claim that c caused e is simply the counterfactual ‘e would not have occurred had c not occurred’.
- 2.
At a Spaces of Evidence conference, Goldsmiths, University of London, 26 Sept 2014. See Moat et al. (2014).
- 3.
Note that holding the view that all causes are INUS conditions does not commit one to the view that all INUS conditions are causes, a view that faces well-known counter-examples (see e.g. Cartwright 1989; Baumgartner 2008, p. 339). Note also that, because adopting a causal structural equations framework is to embrace the view that causes are INUS conditions, accounts based on such frameworks are subject to any sound objections raised against this component of Mackie’s view (see e.g. Baumgartner 2008, p. 342–346).
- 4.
Note that these are necessary conditions, not sufficient.
- 5.
It should be noted that this does not imply the more contentious claim that singular causal claims are transitive. See below for further discussion.
- 6.
So, consider, e.g., a cause c with two effects, e1 and e2. Supposing determinism, e1 obtains iff e2 obtains. That is not among the causal principles. But it obtains on account of the causal principles.
- 7.
This will have to be suitably modified when we are not using just dichotomous variables. Essentially it will go over to something like this: ‘X = x causes a contribution of size ax to outcome Y iff there is a set of factors A that take net value a s.t. under a true equation the net contribution of X to Y given X = x and A = a is ax.’
- 8.
Glymour et al. (2010) defend the view that this is the wrong way to proceed if one’s concern is to arrive at an account of singular causation that is faithful to our intuitions in general.
- 9.
A very helpful anonymous referee is concerned about overdetermination – two factors both sufficient for the same effect according to a correct equation – in asymmetric cases where intuitions want to count one as a cause but not the other. But the INUS/equation-based account is deliberately designed to do just that: two determining causes are both causes; it is a central feature of the Mackie INUS account that there is more than one way to skin a cat! The referee worries that this undermines the job of causes to serve as effective strategies: we might spend effort to ensure the presence of one of the over determiners when another is already there. I agree that that’s true and we would like to know the full structural causal equation to avoid that. But that does not show that the overdeterminer is not an effective strategy, but rather that it is not a cost effective strategy.
- 10.
Though Menzies does not explicitly define it, ‘composition’ is the rule that permits the substitution of the causes x1, …, xn of some effect y to y itself in the right-hand side of any structural equation in which y appears.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alex Marcellesi for research assistance and thank the participants in my winter 2013 graduate seminar on ‘Evidence and Singular Causes’ at UC San Diego as well as an anonymous referee for help with the ideas and details of this paper.
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Cartwright, N. (2017). Single Case Causes: What Is Evidence and Why. In: Chao, HK., Reiss, J. (eds) Philosophy of Science in Practice. Synthese Library, vol 379. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45532-7_2
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