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  1. Philosophie der Soziologie.Simon Lohse & Jens Greve - 2017 - In Simon Lohse & Thomas Reydon (eds.), Grundriss Wissenschaftsphilosophie. Die Philosophien der Einzelwissenschaften. Hamburg: Meiner. pp. 543-582.
    Die Einleitung unseres Kapitels bietet eine grundsäzliche Charakterisierung der Soziologie und zeichnet einige wichtige historische Entwicklungslinien der Philosophie der Soziologie (PdS) nach. Im Hauptteil werden zentrale ontologische sowie ausgewählte explanatorische Themen der PdS vorgestellt. Im Schlussteil sollen einige aktuelle Diskussionen umrissen werden.
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  • On Rationales for Cognitive Values in the Assessment of Scientific Representations.Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn - 2018 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 49 (3):319-331.
    Cognitive values like simplicity, broad scope, and easy handling are properties of a scientific representation that result from the idealization which is involved in the construction of a representation. These properties may facilitate the application of epistemic values to credibility assessments, which provides a rationale for assigning an auxiliary function to cognitive values. In this paper, I defend a further rationale for cognitive values which consists in the assessment of the usefulness of a representation. Usefulness includes the relevance of a (...)
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  • Notes on the use of randomised controlled trials to evaluate complex interventions: Community treatment orders as an illustrative case.Feras Ali Mustafa - 2017 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 23 (1):185-192.
    Over the past seven decades, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have revolutionised clinical research and achieved a gold standard status. However, extending their use to evaluate complex interventions is problematic. In this paper we will demonstrate that complex intervention RCTs violate the necessary premises that govern the RCTs logic and underpin their rigour. The lack of blinding, heterogeneity of participants, as well as poor treatment standardisation and difficulty of controlling for confounders, which characterise complex intervention RCTs, can potentially be profoundly detrimental (...)
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  • Philosophy, medicine and health care – where we have come from and where we are going.Michael Loughlin, Robyn Bluhm, Jonathan Fuller, Stephen Buetow, Ross E. G. Upshur, Kirstin Borgerson, Maya J. Goldenberg & Elselijn Kingma - 2014 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 20 (6):902-907.
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  • Rhetoric and argumentation: how clinical practice guidelines think.Jonathan Fuller - 2013 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 19 (3):433-441.
    Introduction: Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are an important source of justification for clinical decisions in modern evidence-based practice. Yet, we have given little attention to how they argue their evidence. In particular, how do CPGs argue for treatment with long-term medications that are increasingly prescribed to older patients? Approach and rationale: I selected six disease-specific guidelines recommending treatment with five of the medication classes most commonly prescribed for seniors in Ontario, Canada. I considered the stated aims of these CPGs and (...)
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  • Rationality and the generalization of randomized controlled trial evidence.Jonathan Fuller - 2013 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 19 (4):644-647.
    Over the past several decades, we devoted much energy to generating, reviewing and summarizing evidence. We have given far less attention to the issue of how to thoughtfully apply the evidence once we have it. That’s fine if all we care about is that our clinical decisions are evidence-based, but not so good if we also want them to be well-reasoned. Let us not forget that evidence based medicine (EBM) grew out of an interest in making medicine ‘rational’, with the (...)
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  • The Role of Measurement in Establishing Evidence.L. McClimans - 2013 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 38 (5):520-538.
    Measurement outcomes are frequently used as evidence in favor of or against medical and surgical interventions, health policies, and system designs. Indeed, in the medical and health services research literature, outcomes are the currency of policy debate and decision making. Yet in the philosophy of science and philosophy of medicine, the measures used in evidence-based medicine (EBM) are rarely discussed. Rather, the focus here is almost exclusively on study design and hierarchies of evidence. This concentration on the methodology of study (...)
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  • Towards the Methodological Turn in the Philosophy of Science.Hsiang-Ke Chao, Szu-Ting Chen & Roberta L. Millstein - 2013 - In Hsiang-Ke Chao, Szu-Ting Chen & Roberta L. Millstein (eds.), Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics. Dordrecht: Springer.
    This chapter provides an introduction to the study of the philosophical notions of mechanisms and causality in biology and economics. This chapter sets the stage for this volume, Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics, in three ways. First, it gives a broad review of the recent changes and current state of the study of mechanisms and causality in the philosophy of science. Second, consistent with a recent trend in the philosophy of science to focus on scientific practices, it in (...)
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  • Randomized Controlled Trials: How Can We Know “What Works”?Nick Cowen, Baljinder Virk, Stella Mascarenhas-Keyes & Nancy Cartwright - 2017 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 29 (3):265-292.
    ABSTRACT“Evidence-based” methods, which most prominently include randomized controlled trials, have gained increasing purchase as the “gold standard” for assessing the effect of public policies. But the enthusiasm for evidence-based research overlooks questions about the reliability and applicability of experimental findings to diverse real-world settings. Perhaps surprisingly, a qualitative study of British educators suggests that they are aware of these limitations and therefore take evidence-based findings with a much larger grain of salt than do policy makers. Their experience suggests that the (...)
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  • Patient-specific devices and population-level evidence: evaluating therapeutic interventions with inherent variation.Mary Jean Walker - 2018 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 21 (3):335-345.
    Designing and manufacturing medical devices for specific patients is becoming increasingly feasible with developments in 3D printing and 3D imaging software. This raises the question of how patient-specific devices can be evaluated, since our ‘gold standard’ method for evaluation, the randomised controlled trial, requires that an intervention is standardised across a number of individuals in an experimental group. I distinguish several senses of patient-specific device, and focus the discussion on understanding the problem of variations between instances of an intervention for (...)
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  • Reason and value: making reasoning fit for practice.Michael Loughlin, Robyn Bluhm, Stephen Buetow, Ross E. G. Upshur, Maya J. Goldenberg, Kirstin Borgerson, Vikki Entwistle & Elselijn Kingma - 2012 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 18 (5):929-937.
    Editors' introduction to 3rd thematic issue on philosophy of medicine.
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  • Treatment effectiveness, generalizability, and the explanatory/pragmatic-trial distinction.Steven Tresker - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-29.
    The explanatory/pragmatic-trial distinction enjoys a burgeoning philosophical and medical literature and a significant contingent of support among philosophers and healthcare stakeholders as an important way to assess the design and results of randomized controlled trials. A major motivation has been the need to provide relevant, generalizable data to drive healthcare decisions. While talk of pragmatic and explanatory trials could be seen as convenient shorthand, the distinction can also be seen as harboring deeper issues related to inferential strategies used to evaluate (...)
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  • Fact-value entanglement in positive economics.Julian Reiss - 2017 - Journal of Economic Methodology 24 (2):134-149.
    This paper presents arguments that challenge what I call the fact/value separability thesis: the idea, roughly, that factual judgements can be made independently of judgements of value. I will look at arguments to the effect that facts and values are entangled in the following areas of the scientific process in economics: theory development, economic concept formation, economic modelling, hypothesis testing, and hypothesis acceptance.
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  • The resisted rise of randomisation in experimental design: British agricultural science, c.1910–1930.Dominic Berry - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (3):242-260.
    The most conspicuous form of agricultural experiment is the field trial, and within the history of such trials, the arrival of the randomised control trial is considered revolutionary. Originating with R.A. Fisher within British agricultural science in the 1920s and 30s, the RCT has since become one of the most prodigiously used experimental techniques throughout the natural and social sciences. Philosophers of science have already scrutinised the epistemological uniqueness of RCTs, undermining their status as the ‘gold standard’ in experimental design. (...)
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  • Mechanisms and the Evidence Hierarchy.Brendan Clarke, Donald Gillies, Phyllis Illari, Federica Russo & Jon Williamson - 2014 - Topoi 33 (2):339-360.
    Evidence-based medicine (EBM) makes use of explicit procedures for grading evidence for causal claims. Normally, these procedures categorise evidence of correlation produced by statistical trials as better evidence for a causal claim than evidence of mechanisms produced by other methods. We argue, in contrast, that evidence of mechanisms needs to be viewed as complementary to, rather than inferior to, evidence of correlation. In this paper we first set out the case for treating evidence of mechanisms alongside evidence of correlation in (...)
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  • Philosophy, ethics, medicine and health care: the urgent need for critical practice.Michael Loughlin, Ross E. G. Upshur, Maya J. Goldenberg, Robyn Bluhm & Kirstin Borgerson - 2010 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 16 (2):249-259.
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  • What’s in a gold standard? In defence of randomised controlled trials.Marius Backmann - 2017 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 20 (4):513-523.
    The standardised randomised clinical trial (RCT) has been exceedingly popular in medical research, economics, and practical policy making. Recently, RCTs have faced criticism. First, it has been argued by John Worrall that we cannot be certain that our sample is not atypical with regard to possible confounding factors. I will argue that at least in the case of medical research, we know enough about the relevant causal mechanisms to be justified to ignore a number of factors we have good reason (...)
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  • Two approaches to reasoning from evidence or what econometrics can learn from biomedical research.Julian Reiss - 2015 - Journal of Economic Methodology 22 (3):373-390.
    This paper looks at an appeal to the authority of biomedical research that has recently been used by empirical economists to motivate and justify their methods. I argue that those who make this appeal mistake the nature of biomedical research. Randomised trials, which are said to have revolutionised biomedical research, are a central methodology, but according to only one paradigm. There is another paradigm at work in biomedical research, the inferentialist paradigm, in which randomised trials play no special role. I (...)
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  • Causal hypotheses are useful in medicine, also more limited ones – a response to Robyn Bluhm on 'capacities in psychiatry'.Dieneke Hubbeling - 2013 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 19 (3):562-563.
    This is a response to the response by Robyn Bluhm to my paper, and I am again arguing for a limited role of capacities in psychiatry, given the current scientific uncertainties.
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  • The application of Cartwright's concept of capacities to complex interventions in psychiatry.Dieneke Hubbeling - 2012 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 18 (5):1013-1018.
    Cartwright and Munro argued that extrapolation of findings from randomized controlled trials to other settings can be difficult because information about the underlying causal structure and subgroups is often not available. They advocated the use of ‘capacities’ – that is fixed causal contributions – in predicting effects of interventions. In psychiatry, it is often not possible to determine what the fixed causal contributions are and one can only establish ‘approximate capacities’. However, using ‘approximate capacities’ does imply a different way of (...)
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  • Hierarchies of evidence in evidence-based medicine.Christopher Blunt - 2015 - Dissertation, London School of Economics
    Hierarchies of evidence are an important and influential tool for appraising evidence in medicine. In recent years, hierarchies have been formally adopted by organizations including the Cochrane Collaboration [1], NICE [2,3], the WHO [4], the US Preventive Services Task Force [5], and the Australian NHMRC [6,7]. The development of such hierarchies has been regarded as a central part of Evidence-Based Medicine, a movement within healthcare which prioritises the use of epidemiological evidence such as that provided by Randomised Controlled Trials. Philosophical (...)
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  • Why Do Experts Disagree?Julian Reiss - 2020 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 32 (1):218-241.
    Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge argues forcefully that there are inherent limitations to the predictability of human action, due to a circumstance he calls “ideational heterogeneity.” However, our resources for predicting human action somewhat reliably in the light of ideational heterogeneity have not been exhausted yet, and there are no in-principle barriers to progress in tackling the problem. There are, however, other strong reasons to think that disagreement among epistocrats is bound to persist, such that it will be difficult to (...)
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  • Randomization and Rules for Causal Inferences in Biology: When the Biological Emperor (Significance Testing) Has No Clothes.Kristin Shrader-Frechette - 2011 - Biological Theory 6 (2):154-161.
    Why do classic biostatistical studies, alleged to provide causal explanations of effects, often fail? This article argues that in statistics-relevant areas of biology—such as epidemiology, population biology, toxicology, and vector ecology—scientists often misunderstand epistemic constraints on use of the statistical-significance rule (SSR). As a result, biologists often make faulty causal inferences. The paper (1) provides several examples of faulty causal inferences that rely on tests of statistical significance; (2) uncovers the flawed theoretical assumptions, especially those related to randomization, that likely (...)
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  • Reassessing Quasi-experiments: Policy Evaluation, Induction, and SUTVA.Tom Boesche - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (1):1-22.
    This paper defends the use of quasi-experiments for causal estimation in economics against the widespread objection that quasi-experimental estimates lack external validity. The defence is that quasi-experimental replication of estimates can yield defeasible evidence for external validity. The paper then develops a different objection. The stable unit treatment value assumption, on which quasi-experiments rely, is argued to be implausible due to the influence of social interaction effects on economic outcomes. A more plausible stable marginal unit treatment value assumption is proposed, (...)
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  • Randomized controlled trials versus rough set analysis: two competing approaches for evaluating clinical data.Tomasz Rzepiński - 2014 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 35 (4):271-288.
    The present paper deals with the problem of evaluating empirical evidence for therapeutic decisions in medicine. The article discusses the views of Nancy Cartwright and John Worrall on the function that randomization plays in ascertaining causal relations with reference to the therapies applied. The main purpose of the paper is to present a general idea of alternative method of evaluating empirical evidence. The method builds on data analysis that makes use of rough set theory. The first attempts to apply the (...)
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  • (1 other version)Types of experiments and causal process tracing: What happened on the Kaibab Plateau in the 1920s.Roberta L. Millstein - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 78:98-104.
    In a well-cited book chapter, ecologist Jared Diamond characterizes three main types of experiment performed in community ecology: laboratory experiment, field experiment, and natural experiment. Diamond argues that each form of experiment has strengths and weaknesses, with respect to, for example, realism or the ability to follow a causal trajectory. But does Diamond’s typology exhaust the available kinds of cause-finding practices? Some social scientists have characterized something they call “causal process tracing.” Is this a fourth type of experiment or something (...)
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  • Choosing a patient-reported outcome measure.Leah M. McClimans & John Browne - 2011 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 32 (1):47-60.
    There has been much philosophical interest regarding the ‘hierarchy of evidence’ used to determine which study designs are of most value for reporting on questions of effectiveness, prognosis, and so on. There has been much less philosophical interest in the choice of outcome measures with which the results of, say, an RCT or a cohort study are presented. In this paper, we examine the FDA’s recently published guidelines for assessing the psychometric adequacy of patient-reported outcome measures. We focus on their (...)
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  • Virtue, Progress and Practice.Michael Loughlin, Robyn Bluhm, Stephen Buetow, Ross E. G. Upshur, Maya J. Goldenberg, Kirstin Borgerson & Vikki Entwistle - 2011 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 17 (5):839-846.
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  • Explanation, understanding, objectivity and experience.Michael Loughlin, Robyn Bluhm, Drozdstoj S. Stoyanov, Stephen Buetow, Ross E. G. Upshur, Kirstin Borgerson, Maya J. Goldenberg & Elselijn Kingma - 2013 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 19 (3):415-421.
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  • Analysis of scientific truth status in controlled rehabilitation trials.Roger Kerry, Aurélien Madouasse, Antony Arthur & Stephen D. Mumford - 2013 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 19 (4):617-625.
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  • Jeremy Howick: The philosophy of evidence-based medicine: Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex, UK, 2011, 229 pp, $58.95 , ISBN: 9781405196673. [REVIEW]Robyn Bluhm - 2011 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 32 (6):423-427.
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  • Capacities in psychiatry: a commentary on Hubbeling.Robyn Bluhm - 2012 - Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 18 (5):1019-1019.
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  • An Evidence-Hierarchical Decision Aid for Ranking in Evidence-Based Medici.Jürgen Landes - 2020 - In Barbara Osimani & Adam La Caze (eds.), Uncertainty in Pharmacology. pp. 231-259.
    This chapter addresses the problem of ranking available drugs in guideline development to support clinicians in their work. Based on a pragmatic approach to the notion of evidence and a hierarchical view on different kinds of evidence this chapter introduces a decision aid, HiDAD, which draws on the multi criteria decision making literature. This decision aid implements the wide-spread intuition that there are different kinds of evidence with varying degrees of importance by relying on a strict ordinal ordering of kinds (...)
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  • Learning from Scientific Disagreement.Bruno Borge & Nicolás Lo Guercio - 2021 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 36 (3):375-398.
    The article addresses the question of how should scientific peers revise their beliefs (if at all) upon recognized disagreement. After presenting the basics of peer disagreement in sections 1 and 2, we focus, in section 3, on a concrete case of scientific disagreement, to wit, the dispute over the evidential status of randomized control trials in medical practice. The examination of this case motivates the idea that some scientific disagreements permit a steadfast reaction. In section 4, we support this conclusion (...)
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  • The application of Evidence-Based Medicine methodologies in sports science: problems and solutions.William Levack-Payne - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Kent
    This thesis analyses the use of 'Evidence-Based' methodologies of evidence assessment and intervention and policy design from medicine, and their use in sport and exercise science. It argues that problems exist with the application of Evidence-Based methodologies in sports science, meaning that the quality of evidence used to inform decision-making is lower than is often assumed. This thesis also offers realistic solutions to these problems, broadly arguing for the importance of taking evidence from mechanistic studies seriously, in addition to evidence (...)
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