[SydPhil] HPS Research Seminar, Thursday 30 May 2024 at 5.00pm

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School of History and Philosophy of Science
RESEARCH SEMINAR
[The University of Sydney]
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The situation is hopeless, but not serious: on the non-use of causal language in reporting research
Riin Koiv (USYD)
Dates: Thursday, 30/05/2024
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: A31.03.3001.Sydney Nanoscience Hub (SNH).SNH Seminar Room 3001
How to register: Free, no registration required
Abstract: Various fields of biomedical, psychological and genetics research appear to adhere to a "no causal language" norm: researchers are encouraged to avoid causal vocabulary and use correlational vocabulary instead when reporting the aims and findings of observational research. This norm is visible in terminological choices of the research paper authors and is sometimes explicitly stated, for example in journal editorial guidelines such as this:

"Causal language (including use of terms such as effect and efficacy) should be used only for randomized clinical trials. For all other study designs [...], methods and results should be described in terms of association or correlation and should avoid cause-and-effect wording."  (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/instructions-for-authors<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/ZrkvC71R2NTEyWWk6Hk7m0j?domain=t.e2ma.net>)

I will argue that this norm and the resulting practice of omitting causal language from research reports are unlikely to achieve one of their aims: preventing other scientists and the general public from interpreting the aims and findings of observational (or any other) research causally. The expectation that it does prevent this, I suggest, rests on mistaken assumptions about the nature of linguistic content, language processing and human psychology. Furthermore, I suggest that under some circumstances, avoiding explicitly causal language may even be counterproductive to this aim.

Bio: Riin Koiv is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney and a visiting fellow at Macquarie University where I am a member of the Theory and Method in Biosciences group. I got my PhD from the University of Tartu in 2021. I am working on issues concerning the content, scope, and implications of different types of biological explanations of, mostly, human phenomena. My current work (1) focuses on the relationship between genetic and social explanations of human traits and (1) factors impacting people's interpretation of scientific claims about genetic causality.


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