Next week I’ll be visiting America to talk in Pittsburgh, Richmond, and twice at Tufts. I do not expect audience overlap so I’ll give the same talk in all venues, with adjustments for audience depending on whether it’s primarily philosophers or epidemiologists I’m talking to. The abstract is below. I haven’t got a written version of the paper that I can share yet but would of course welcome comments at this stage.

ABSTRACT

Attribution, prediction, and the causal interpretation problem in epidemiology

In contemporary epidemiology, there is a movement, part theoretical and part pedagogical, attempting to discipline and clarify causal thinking. I refer to this movement as the Potential Outcomes Aproach (POA). It draws inspiration from the work of Donald Ruben and, more recently, Judea Pearl, among others. It is most easily recognized by its use of Directed Acycylic Graphs (DAGs) to describe causal situations, but DAGs are not the conceptual basis of the POA in epidemiology. The conceptual basis (as I have argued elsewhere) is a commitment to the view that the hallmark of a meaningful causal claim is that they can be used to make predictions about hypothetical scenarios. Elsewhere I have argued that this commitment is problematic (notwithstanding the clear connections with counterfactual, contrastive and interventionist views in philosophy). In this paper I take a more constructive approach, seeking to address the problem that troubles advocates of the POA. This is the causal interpretation problem (CIP). We can calculate various quantities that are supposed to be measures of causal strength, but it is not always clear how to interpret these quantities. Measures of attributability are most troublesome here, and these are the measures on which POA advocates focus. What does it mean, they ask, to say that a certain fraction of population risk of mortality is attributable to obesity? The pre-POA textbook answer is that, if obesity were reduced, mortality would be correspondingly lower. But this is not obviously true, because there are methods for reducing obesity (smoking, cholera infection) which will not reduce mortality. In general, say the POA advocates, a measure of attributability tells us next to nothing about the likely effect of any proposed public health intervention, rendering these measures useless, and so, for epidemiological purposes, meaningless. In this paper I ask whether there is a way to address and resolve the causal interpretation problem without resorting to the extreme view that a meaningful causal claim must always support predictions in hypothetical scenarios. I also seek connections with the notorious debates about heritability.