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Author Archives: Jon Williamson
Why did medicine progress so slowly?
One theory is that physicians gave too much credence to hypothesised mechanisms for which there was little or no evidence. If so, the problem was one of method: too little time spent obtaining solid evidence of mechanisms and too little inclination to properly evaluate the evidence that was available.
What do we need to establish about a mechanism?
We all know that correlation is not causation. A correlation can be due to factors other than causation, such as bias, confounding, chance, time-series trends (e.g., the correlation between British bread prices and the sea level in Venice), or semantic, logical, physical or mathematical connections. In order to rule out these alternative explanations of a correlation – and establish causation – we need to seek evidence of a mechanism. One needs to account for the correlation via some mechanism by which the putative cause brings about the putative effect.
The role of orientation experiments in discovering mechanisms
There’s a new paper with this title in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, which looks very interesting. It’s by Raoul Gervais and Erik Weber at Ghent. Here’s the abstract:
Doctoral training initiative at Kent: evidence and its quality
The Philosophy Department at the University of Kent is organising a doctoral training initiative on Evidence and its Quality and we welcome applications to our PhD programme from those working on this topic.