Causal webs in epidemiology
| Abstract | The notion of ‘causal web’ emerged in the epidemiological literature in the early Sixties and had to wait until the Nineties for a thorough critical appraisal. Famously, Nancy Krieger argued that such a notion isn’t helpful unless we specify what kind of spiders create the webs. This means, according to Krieger, (i) that the role of the spiders is to provide an explanation of the yarns of the web and (ii) that the sought spiders have to be biological and social. This paper contributes to the development of the notion of causal web, elaborating on the two following points: (i) to catch the spiders we need multi-fold evidence—specifically, mechanistic and difference-making—and (ii) for the eco-social to be explanatory, the web has to be mechanistic in a sense to be specified. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | No categories specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,701 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesFrank C. Keil (1989). Spiders in the Web of Belief: The Tangled Relations Between Concepts and Theories. Mind and Language 4 (1-2):43-50.
D. Benjamin Barros (2013). Negative Causation in Causal and Mechanistic Explanation. Synthese 190 (3):449-469.
Jaegwon Kim (1981). Causes as Explanations: A Critique. Theory and Decision 13 (4):293-309.
Ulrich Krohs (2006). The Changeful Fate of a Groundbreaking Insight: The Darwinian Fitness Principle Caught in Different Webs of Belief. Yearbook for European Culture of Science 2:107-124.
Andy Clark (1998). Time and Mind. Journal of Philosophy 95 (7):354-76.
Alex Broadbent (2011). Inferring Causation in Epidemiology: Mechanisms, Black Boxes, and Contrasts. In Phyllis McKay Illari, Federica Russo & Jon Williamson (eds.), Causality in the Sciences. Oxford University Press.
Gregory Brazeal (2011). Webs of Faith as a Source of Reasonable Disagreement. Critical Review 23 (4):421-448.
Federica Russo (2009). Variational Causal Claims in Epidemiology. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 52 (4):540-554.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-11-01Total downloads11 ( #99,573 of 549,119 )Recent downloads (6 months)0How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
