Causal reasoning and contrastive explanations

Causal reasoning is of huge importance to healthcare. Why? Because the aim of healthcare is often to change things, to make people better, for example. And to change things, one needs to know what causes what, what might cause someone to get or to feel better. But it is often difficult to find out what causes what.

One approach often associated with diagnosis is the ‘hypothetical deductive’ account. On this approach, one thinks up a hypothesis, works out what would follow if the hypothesis were true (one makes a prediction) and then investigates to see whether it is. But there is a less well known but more elegant approach based on contrastive explanation.

This session examines some causal reasoning about a mysterious hospital infection to see what general lessons can be learnt for reasoning about causes.

Reading extract from:

• Lipton, P. (2004) Inference to the Best Explanation, London: Routledge

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