China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
The search for causation
Published in Louis Cohen, Lawrence Manion, Keith Morrison, Research Methods in Education, 2017
Louis Cohen, Lawrence Manion, Keith Morrison
Interventionist approaches, and the determination of the effects of causes, risk mixing perception with fact, and, regardless of evidence, human inclinations may be to judge data and situations on the basis of personal perceptions and opinions that, indeed, may fly in the face of evidence (the ‘base rate fallacy’; Morrison, 2009, pp. 170–1; see also Kahneman, 2012). This is only one source of unreliability, and it is important to consider carefully what actually are the effects of causes rather than jumping to statements of causation based on premature evidence of connections.
Philosophical expertise
Published in David Coady, James Chase, The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology, 2018
Experts in philosophy also have impressive factual knowledge that is less mundane, so to speak. Here is a sample of much more advanced claims that something like 90% of philosophers with the relevant expertise (i.e., several publications in the “area of specialization”) will agree on: Epistemicism faces a serious objection regarding how sharp meanings are fixed.There are good reasons to think that truths about causation are closely connected to certain counterfactual truths and/or truths about laws of nature.The thesis that our belief contents are fixed by the internal goings-on of our bodies faces a serious challenge from Putnam’s elm-beech story, in which the two terms counterfactually switch meanings while the protagonist is the same physically from the skin in.Solving the problems of material composition will probably require solutions to various puzzles about vagueness, such as the forced-march sorites paradox.Kripke’s puzzle about belief provides a strong challenge to the basic Fregean argument that the interchange of coreferential proper names in belief contexts doesn’t always preserve truth-value.Most initially intuitive solutions to the alethic paradoxes are inadequate, as they stand, because they are unable, as they stand, to successfully deal with certain clever “revenge” sentences.The plausible idea that the traditionally conceived God would have to make the best universe within his power to make is challenged by the idea that there are good non-religious grounds for thinking there is no such possible universe.When people who are mathematically not sophisticated make the base rate fallacy in arguing for a certain conclusion, although their conclusion may not be supported by their evidence, they are in an important epistemic sense blameless in drawing that conclusion.If there are good non-theistic, purely naturalistic reasons for thinking that we are truly awful at judging when an instance of suffering is directly or indirectly paired with an outweighing good, then there is a good chance the theist has a reasonable response to the problem of gratuitous evil.The presentist idea that what really exists doesn’t include past or future entities faces a serious challenge from the General Theory of Relativity.
Associations Between Firearm and Suicide Rates: A Replication of Kleck (2021)
Published in Archives of Suicide Research, 2023
Kleck also dismisses arguments that method substitution could result in more suicides due to differences in lethality, claiming that, based on his own analysis of U.S. suicide data (Kleck, 2018), firearm suicide attempts are not significantly more lethal than hanging, the second most common suicide method. However, numerous other studies and systematic reviews find that firearm suicide attempts are in fact deadlier (Cai, Junus, Chang, & Yip, 2022; Elnour & Harrison, 2008; Shenassa, Catlin, & Buka, 2003), and his own data do not support this claim.2 But the most glaring issue is this argument falls victim to the base-rate fallacy: Kleck uses completed suicides as his denominator rather than suicide attempts. His own prior analysis (Kleck, 2018) of CDC data suggests that in the United States, while firearm and hanging/suffocation suicide attempts accounted for the majority of attempts (52.5% and 24.0%) but less than 10% of completions (5.8% and 2.9%). Conversely, poisonings accounted for nearly two-thirds of suicide attempts (63.9%) but just 2.5% of completions. This means that even if a small share of suicide attempts substituted a firearm for poison, the number of attempts would stay the same while completed suicides would increase.