How do medical researchers make causal inferences?

Bradford Hill (1965) highlighted nine aspects of the complex evidential situation a medical researcher faces when determining whether a causal relation exists between a disease and various conditions associated with it. These aspects are widely cited in the literature on epidemiological inference as justifying an inference to a causal claim, but the epistemological basis of the Hill aspects is not understood. We offer an explanatory coherentist interpretation, explicated by Thagard's ECHO model of explanatory coherence. The ECHO model captures the complexity of epidemiological inference and provides a tractable model for inferring disease causation. We apply this model to three cases: the inference of a causal connection between the Zika virus and birth defects, the classic inference that smoking causes cancer, and John Snow’s inference about the cause of cholera

Collaborative Knowledge

This symposium will discuss various kinds of collaborative knowledge, i.e. knowledge that develops as the result of the cooperative work of groups of people

Hot Cognition Mechanisms For Motivated Inference

We present an implemented computational theory of motivated inference intended to account for a variety of experimental results. People make motivated inferences when their conclusions are biased by their general motives ot goals. Our theory postulates four elements to account for such biasing. (1) A representation of the self, including attributes and motives. (2) A mechanism for evaluating the relevance of a potential conclusion to the motives of the self. (3) Mechanisms for motivated memory search to retrieve desired conceptions of the self and evidence supporting desired conclusions. (4) Inference rules with parameters that can be adjusted to encourage desired inferences and impede undesired ones

Eighty phenomena about the self: representation, evaluation, regulation, and change

We propose a new approach for examining self-related aspects and phenomena. The approach includes (1) a taxonomy and (2) an emphasis on multiple levels of mechanisms. The taxonomy categorizes approximately eighty self-related phenomena according to three primary functions involving the self: representing, effecting, and changing. The representing self encompasses the ways in which people depict themselves, either to themselves or to others (e.g., self-concepts, self-presentation). The effecting self concerns ways in which people facilitate or limit their own traits and behaviors (e.g., self-enhancement, self-regulation). The changing self is less time-limited than the regulating self; it concerns phenomena that involve lasting alterations in how people represent and control themselves (e.g., self-expansion, self-development). Each self-related phenomenon within these three categories may be examined at four levels of interacting mechanisms (social, individual, neural, and molecular). We illustrate our approach by focusing on seven self-related phenomena

Darwin and the Golden Rule: How To Distinguish Differences of Degree from Differences of Kind Using Mechanisms

Darwin claimed that human and animal minds differ in degree but not in kind, and that ethical principles such as the Golden Rule are just an extension of thinking found in animals. Both claims are false. The best way to distinguish differences in degree from differences in kind is by identifying mechanisms that have emergent properties. Recursive thinking is an emergent capability found in humans but not in other animals. The Golden Rule and some other ethical principles such as Kant’s categorical imperative require recursion, so they constitute ethical thinking that is restricted to humans. Changes in kind have tipping points resulting from mechanisms with emergent properties