Perhaps an odd thing to do, but I’m posting the abstracts of my two next talks, which will also become papers. Any offers to discuss/read welcome!

The talks will be at Rhodes on 1 and 3 October. I’ll probably deliver a descendant of one of them at the Cambridge Philosophy of Science Seminar on 3 December, and may also give a very short version of 1 at the World Health Summit in Berlin on 22 Oct.

1. Causation and Prediction in Epidemiology

There is an ongoing “methodological revolution” in epidemiology, according to some commentators. The revolution is prompted by the development of a conceptual framework for thinking about causation called the “potential outcomes approach”, and the mathematical apparatus of directed acyclic graphs that accompanies it. But once the mathematics are stripped away, a number of striking assumptions about causation become evident: that a cause is something that makes a difference; that a cause is something that humans can intervene on; and that epidemiologists need nothing more from a notion of causation than picking out events satisfying those two criteria. This is especially remarkable in a discipline that has variously identified factors such as race and sex as determinants of health. In this talk I seek to explain the significance of this movement in epidemiology, separate its insights from its errors, and draw a general philosophical lesson about confusing causal knowledge with predictive knowledge.

2. Causal Selection, Prediction, and Natural Kinds

Causal judgements are typically – invariably – selective. We say that striking the match caused it to light, but we do not mention the presence of oxygen, the ancestry of the striker, the chain of events that led to that particular match being in her hand at that time, and so forth. Philosophers have typically but not universally put this down to the pragmatic difficulty of listing the entire history of the universe every time one wants to make a causal judgement. The selective aspect of causal judgements is typically thought of as picking out causes that are salient for explanatory or moral purposes. A minority, including me, think that selection is more integral than that to the notion of causation. The difficulty with this view is that it seems to make causal facts non-objective, since selective judgements clearly vary with our interests. In this paper I seek to make a case for the inherently selective nature of causal judgements by appealing to two contexts where interest-relativity is clearly inadequate to fully account for selection. Those are the use of causal judgements in formulating predictions, and the relation between causation and natural kinds.