Abstract
Amalgamating evidence from heterogeneous sources and across levels of inquiry is becoming increasingly important in many pure and applied sciences. This special issue provides a forum for researchers from diverse scientific and philosophical perspectives to discuss evidence amalgamation, its methodologies, its history, its pitfalls, and its potential. We situate the contributions therein within six themes from the broad literature on this subject: the variety-of-evidence thesis, the philosophy of meta-analysis, the role of robustness/sensitivity analysis for evidence amalgamation, its bearing on questions of extrapolation and external validity of experiments, its connection with theory development, and its interface with causal inference, especially regarding causal theories of cancer.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3163-3188 |
| Number of pages | 26 |
| Journal | Synthese |
| Volume | 196 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 15 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work is supported by the European Research Council (Grant 639276) and the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. SCF acknowledges partial support from the European Commission through a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (PIIF-GA-2013-628533). All guest editors would like to thank Barbara Osimani for her role in brining about this SI as an initial member of the team. We are also grateful to Otávio Bueno for his continued support and wise advice throughout the smooth and enjoyable production process of this SI. Finally, many thanks to all those who submitted manuscripts and the anonymous referees for their time, effort, and excellent work.
Funding Information:
This work is supported by the European Research Council (Grant 639276) and the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. SCF acknowledges partial support from the European Commission through a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (PIIF-GA-2013-628533). All guest editors would like to thank Barbara Osimani for her role in brining about this SI as an initial member of the team. We are also grateful to Ot?vio Bueno for his continued support and wise advice throughout the smooth and enjoyable production process of this SI. Finally, many thanks to all those who submitted manuscripts and the anonymous referees for their time, effort, and excellent work.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, Springer Nature B.V.
Keywords
- Causal inference
- Causal theories of cancer
- External validity
- Extrapolation
- Meta-analysis
- Sensitivity analysis
- Theory development
- Variety-of-evidence thesis
