“Correlation Does Not Imply Causation”: Bradford Hill, Causative Inference, and Obesity-Related Neuropathy

Does non-correlation imply non-causation?

The Markov condition describes the conditional independence relations present in a causal model that are consequent to its graphical structure, whereas the faithfulness assumption presumes that there are no other independencies in the model. Cartwright argues that causal inference methods have limited applicability because the Markov condition cannot always be applied to domains, and gives an e...

SYMPOSIUM ON EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINE Current epistemological problems in evidence based medicine

Evidence based medicine has been a topic of considerable controversy in medical and health care circles over its short lifetime, because of the claims made by its exponents about the criteria used to assess the evidence for or against the effectiveness of medical interventions. The central epistemological debates underpinning the debates about evidence based medicine are reviewed by this paper,...

Causation in Cases of Delayed Medical Diagnosis or Treatment

Poverty Traps: Exploring the Complexity of Causation

Describing and explaining are two very different engagements, and yet development experts routinely write as though to describe were to explain. If this were not the case, it would be hard to understand why they have found it necessary to repeatedly describe the lives of the world’s poorest over the past 30 years. Consider the following sentence constructed from numerous writings—for example, b...

Proving Causation: Probability versus Belief