Delighted to announce the online publication of this paper in International Journal of Epidemiology, with Jan Vandenbroucke and Neil Pearce: ‘Causality and Causal Inference in Epidemiology: the Need for a Pluralistic Approach‘

This paper has already generated some controversy and I’m really looking forward to talking about it with my co-authors at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on 7 March. (I’ll also be giving some solo talks while in the UK, at Cambridge, UCL, and Oxford, as well as one in Bergen, Norway.)

The paper is on the same topic as a single-authored paper of mine published late 2015, ‘Causation and Prediction in Epidemiology: a Guide to the Methodological Revolution.‘ But it is much shorter, and nonetheless manages to add a lot that was not present in my sole-authored paper – notably a methodological dimension that, as a philosopher by training, I was ignorant. The co-authoring process was thus really rich and interesting for me.

It also makes me think that philosophy papers should be shorter… Do we really need the first 2500 words summarising the current debate etc? I wonder if a more compressed style might actually stimulate more thinking, even if the resulting papers are less argumentatively airtight. One might wonder how often the airtight ideal is achieved even with traditional length paper… Who was it who said that in philosophy, it’s all over by the end of the first page?