#167 Rani Lill Anjum: Philosophy of Causation, Scientific Models, and Medicine
Dr. Rani Lill Anjum is Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) School of Economics and Business, and Leader of the CAPS – Center for Applied Philosophy of Science since 2018. She spent two years at the University of Nottingham, working with Professor Stephen Mumford on dispositions and causation from 2007 to 2009. Together they developed a new theory of causation. After Nottingham, she got funding from FRIPRO NFR for a 4-year research project, Causation in Science (CauSci), hosted by the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) from January 2011. In May 2014 she was offered a permanent contract as Research Fellow at HH NMBU. In December 2014 her new research project Causation, Complexity and Evidence in Health Sciences (CauseHealth) got funded by FRIPRO and started up in the spring 2015 at NMBU. In 2018 she established NMBU CAPS – Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science. Dr. Lill Anjum has coauthored 4 books with Dr. Stephen Mumford: Getting Causes from Powers (2011), Causation: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery (2018), and What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality (2018).
In this episode, we talk about the philosophy of causation, and a new approach to causation in philosophy and science developed by Dr. Lill Anjum in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Mumford, based on a metaphysics of powers or dispositions. We discuss how we should think about causality when there are several factors acting on a particular phenomenon; the intrinsic limitations of scientific models of the world; how can shifting from neuron diagrams of causal relations to vectors might improve those same models; and reductionism and emergentism. Throughout the interview, Dr. Lill Anjum illustrates all of these issues with examples coming from medicine, an area she has been focusing a lot of her work on causation recently.
Time Links:
A metaphysics of powers (or dispositions)
How to think about attributing causality when there are several factors
Necessity in the philosophy of causation
Thinking in probabilities
The limitations of scientific models
Neuron diagrams vs vectors
Applications in medicine
Causality, reductionism and emergentism
Explanation and prediction in science, and its inductive nature
Follow Dr. Lill Anjum’s work!
Follow Dr. Lill Anjum’s work:
Personal Website: https://ranilillanjum.wordpress.com/
Rani blogs about causation Blog: https://bit.ly/2ECdaid
Faculty page: https://bit.ly/2EitXpm
Articles of Researchgate: https://bit.ly/2BVoPqM
Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science (CAPS): https://bit.ly/2VpUcAT
Cause Health Blog: https://bit.ly/2IHKlVQ
Twitter handle: @ranilillanjum
Books:
Getting Causes from Powers (2011): https://amzn.to/2EABmS0
Causation: A Very Short Introduction (2013): https://amzn.to/2TlR7V3
Causation in Science and the Methods of Scientific Discovery (2018): https://amzn.to/2BZsBiW
What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality (2018): https://amzn.to/2tESQXl