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. This paper argues the contrary. It provides a catalogue of evidence types that can support singular causal claims, and it develops a theoretical framework that shows that these types are evidence for causation in the single case.
CITATION STYLE
Cartwright, N. (2017). Single Case Causes: What Is Evidence and Why. In Philosophy of Science in Practice (pp. 11–24). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45532-7_2
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