The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on July 28, 2007
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2007 58(3):451-488; doi:10.1093/bjps/axm024
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Why There's No Cause to Randomize
Dept of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE
J.Worrall{at}lse.ac.uk
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Abstract |
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The evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is widely regarded as supplying the ‘gold standard’ in medicine—we may sometimes have to settle for other forms of evidence, but this is always epistemically second-best. But how well justified is the epistemic claim about the superiority of RCTs? This paper adds to my earlier (predominantly negative) analyses of the claims produced in favour of the idea that randomization plays a uniquely privileged epistemic role, by closely inspecting three related arguments from leading contributors to the burgeoning field of probabilistic causality—Papineau, Cartwright and Pearl. It concludes that none of these further arguments supplies any practical reason for thinking of randomization as having unique epistemic power.
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Why the issue is of great practical importance—the ECMO case
- 3 Papineau on the ‘virtues of randomization’
- 4 Cartwright on causality and the ‘ideal’ randomized experiment
- 5 Pearl on randomization, nets and causes
- 6 Conclusion
- 2 Why the issue is of great practical importance—the ECMO case
This is a new version of this article as there was a reference missing from the first version.
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