Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery

Rani Lill Anjum is Researcher in Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science (CAPS) at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). She was postdoctoral fellow at the universities of Tromsø and Nottingham, the result of which was Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford 2011) with Stephen Mumford. At NMBU, she then led the Causation in Science research project and co-wrote Causation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2013) and What Tends to Be: the Philosophy of Dispositional Modality (Routledge, 2018), both with Stephen Mumford. She currently leads the research project Causation, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences (CauseHealth), funded by the Research Council of Norway (NFR).Stephen Mumford is Professor of Metaphysics in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University as well as Professor II at Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). He is the author of Dispositions (Oxford 1998), Russell on Metaphysics (Routledge 2003), Laws in Nature (Routledge 2004), David Armstrong (Acumen 2007), Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion (Routledge 2011), Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford 2011, with Rani Lill Anjum), Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2012), Causation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2013, with Rani Lill Anjum), Glimpse of Light (Bloomsbury, 2017) and What Tends to Be (Routledge 2018, with Rani Lill Anjum).

• I. Science and Philosophy1: Metascience and Better Science2: Do We Need Causation in Science?3: Evidence of Causation is Not CausationII. Perfect Correlation4: What s in a Correlation?5: Same Cause, Same Effect6: Under Ideal Conditions7: One Effect, One Cause?III. Interference and Prevention8: Have Your Cause and Beat It9: From Regularities to Tendencies10: The Modality of CausationIV. Causal Mechanisms11: Is the Business of Science to Construct Theories?12: Is More Data Better?13: The Explanatory Power of Mechanisms14: Digging Deeper to Find the Real Causes?V. Linking Causes to Effects15: Making a Difference16: Making Nothing Happen17: It All Started With a Big Bang18: Does Science Need Laws of Nature?VI. Probability19: Uncertainty, Certainty and Beyond20: What Probabilistic Causation Should Be21: Calculating Conditional Probability?VII. External Validity22: Risky Predictions23: What RCTs Do Not ShowVIII. Discovering Causes and Understanding Them24: Getting Involved25: Uncovering Causal Powers26: Learning From Causal Failure27: Plural Methods, One Causation28: Getting Real About the Ideals of ScienceConclusion: New Norms of Science

Rather, Anjum and Mumford's new text makes an appeal to scientists and to those thinking about science ... to think more critically about causation as a tendency rather than a regularity, as it has more classically been treated ... Recommended.