Distinguishing Mediational Models and Analyses in Clinical Psychology: Atemporal Associations Do Not Imply Causation.

Using Causal Diagrams to Understand Common Problems in Social Epidemiology

Epidemiologists typically seek to answer causal questions using statistical data: we observe a statistical association between poverty and early mortality and seek to determine whether poverty causes early death. An essential component of epidemiologic training is therefore learning what statistical relations imply, or do not imply, about causal relations. This is why the cliché “correlation do...

Distinguishing Association from Causation: a Backgrounder for Journalists

How Well do Orthopedic Surgeons Recognize Different Models of Total Elbow Arthroplasties on Plain Radiographs with the Use of a Diagnostic Flowchart?

Background: Recognition of total elbow arthroplasties (TEAs) on plain radiographs is difficult due to a multitude ofdifferent types and models. Especially if surgery reports and documentation are not available, lost or when the primarysurgery was performed in another hospital the prosthesis type may be undeterminable. Therefore we investigatedin this platform study if a flowch...

A Model of the Common-Sense Theory of Intention and Personal Causation

Certain general properties of man's ability to interpret the actions of other persons are discussed. Some distinguishing features of this common-sense theory include the nature of the modal operators of Can and Try, the asymmetry of implication, and the capacity to embed models within models. The structure of a proposed model of this naive theory of personal causation is presented. This model a...

The Experience of Mental Causation

Most of us have a very firm belief in mental causation; that is, we firmly believe that our own distinctly mental properties are causally efficacious in the production of our behavior. This belief is dominating in contemporary philosophy of mind as a part of the causal explanatory exclusion problem for non-reductive materialists. I do not discuss the exclusion problem; rather, I assess the conc...