Causation in medicine

Our aim in this chapter is to discuss causation in medicine. One key claim for us here is that there are different ways of understanding causes, and these different ways of understanding causes are more or less useful depending on the medical context. One difficulty at the outset is to try and describe the range of contexts that we are interested in. We locate our interest in medicine within the philosophy of science in practice tradition. This means that our foremost aim is to engage with the details of scientific practice. However, what kind(s) of scientific practice does this chapter therefore choose to engage with? We can think of no generally recognized piece of terminology that picks out our field(s) of interest. Rather than invent a new word, for the purposes of this chapter, we will instead define “medicine” in the broadest possible terms to...