Single Case Causes: What is Evidence and Why

Cartwright, N.

Single Case Causes: What is Evidence and Why

Cartwright, N.

Authors

Professor Nancy Cartwright nancy.cartwright@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

How do we establish singular causal claims? It seems we do this all the time, from courtrooms to cloud chambers. Nevertheless, there is a strong lobby in the evidence-based medicine and policy movements that argues that we cannot make reliable causal judgments about single cases in these areas. So we cannot tell whether a policy or treatment ‘worked’ for any specific individual. The reason often seems rooted in the idea that a singular causal claim, if not equivalent to, at least implies, a counterfactual claim: c caused e  e would not have occurred had c not occurred. Couple this with the idea that we cannot have compelling evidence about what would have happened in any actual case had things been different and you end up with serious doubts about the possibility of warranting singular causal claims.

Citation

Cartwright, N. (2015). Single Case Causes: What is Evidence and Why

Online Publication Date	Mar 1, 2015
Publication Date	Mar 1, 2015
Deposit Date	Aug 17, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Oct 13, 2016
Series Title	CHESS Working Papers
Publisher URL	https://www.dur.ac.uk/chess/chessworkingpapers/