Nancy Cartwright (University of California, San Diego)
Orthodox medical opinion is sceptical about methodology for singular causal claims. It is widely maintained that we cannot establish causation in the single case; and, if we could, this would be fairly useless because such claims would not be generalizable. Nor can singular causal claims allow us to estimate effect sizes measuring how well on average one treatment performs compared with another. This talk will dispute this scepticism, and counter with a scepticism of my own: Neither can the favoured methods provide 'generalizable' effect sizes.
