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The Overlooked Role of Cases in Causal Attribution in Medicine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Rachel A. Ankeny
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Abstract

Although cases are central to the epistemic practices utilized within clinical medicine, they appear to be limited in their ability to provide evidence about causal relations because they provide detailed accounts of particular patients without explicit filtering of those attributes most likely to be relevant for explaining the phenomena observed. This paper uses a series of recent case reports to explore the role of cases in causal attribution in medical diagnosis. It is argued that cases are brought together by practitioners to generate causal attributions and testable predictions using a manipulability view of causation.

Type
Medical and Social Sciences
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 81 , Issue 5 , December 2014 , pp. 999 - 1011
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Many thanks to the other participants and the attendees at the 2012 PSA symposium on cases (at which a very early version of this paper was presented), particularly Chris Degeling and Stephen Turner, as well as participants at the Fourth Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice Conference in Toronto (at which a longer version of this paper was presented as a keynote address), where particularly helpful comments were provided by Hasok Chang, Heather Douglas, Catherine Elgin, Maya Goldenberg, Jim Griesemer, Barton Moffatt, Maureen O’Malley, and Mauricio Suárez. I also have benefitted from the ongoing discussions of reasoning using cases in the context of the workshops held at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Pittsburgh in 2011–12 and especially from collaborating with Mary S. Morgan on this topic, as well as comments from Brian Hurwitz.

Correction: This article was reposted on August 2, 2018, to change all instances of “casual” to “causal.”

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