PHI403 Causation in Science — NMBU PhD Course (Anjum & Rocca 2023)

PhD course taught at NMBU (Norwegian University of Life Sciences) by entities/rani-lill-anjum and entities/elena-rocca. The raw material is a series of 20 two-page lecture handouts (dated 2023), filed under raw/Philosophy of Science/. Filenames carry the course code PHI302, but the actual course code is PHI403 (user confirmation).

Note on duplicates: lectures 12 and 13 have -1 variants in the raw folder; these are whitespace-only duplicates and are ignored. Content is drawn from the non--1 files.

Course arc

The course moves through four connected stages:

Metascience and the role of philosophy in science (L1–2). Science carries implicit non-empirical norms; concepts/philosophical-bias is unavoidable. Russell-style dismissal of causation is rebutted: experiment, observation, and application all presuppose causation.
Theories of causation (L3–9). Ontology vs epistemology (concepts/causation); the regularity theory (Hume) and its rescue strategies for exceptions, outliers, and ideal conditions; monocausality vs multi-causality (INUS, mutual manifestation partners); additive vs subtractive interference (concepts/interventionist-theory-of-causation); the shift from regularities to tendencies (concepts/dispositionalism).
Data, mechanisms, and levels (L10–14). Theory-ladenness of data (Hanson, Leonelli); Humean universalism vs dispositionalist singularism and the problem of external validity (Cartwright & Hardie on India vs Bangladesh); explanatory power of mechanisms and the Russo-Williamson thesis; reductionism, emergence, holism, demergence; causal chains, determinism, non-transitivity.
Probability, RCTs, and methodological pluralism (L15–20). Credence vs chance; frequentism vs propensity (concepts/probabilistic-causation); philosophical pathologies of conditional probability (ratio formula, material conditional); external validity and overfitting in prediction; RCT limitations (ecological fallacy, publication bias, policy non-derivability); the positive programme of ontological monism + methodological pluralism (concepts/causal-pluralism).

The underlying argument is that scientific method is never philosophically neutral — every method assumes a theory of causation, and every theory of causation has cases it handles well and cases it handles badly. The only way to avoid being misled is to make the commitments explicit and to use plural methods attuned to different symptoms of causation.

Lecture index

#	Lecture	Page
01	Metascience and Better Science	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-01-metascience
02	Do We Need Causation in Science?	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-02-do-we-need-causation
03	Evidence Based on What?	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-03-evidence-based-on-what
04	What's in a Correlation?	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-04-whats-in-a-correlation
05	Same Cause, Same Effect?	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-05-same-cause-same-effect
06	Under Ideal Conditions	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-06-under-ideal-conditions
07	One Effect, One Cause?	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-07-one-effect-one-cause
08	Have Your Cause and Beat It	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-08-have-your-cause-and-beat-it
09	From Regularities to Tendencies	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-09-from-regularities-to-tendencies
10	Is it the Business of Science to Construct Theories?	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-10-business-of-science
11	Is More Data Better?	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-11-is-more-data-better
12	The Explanatory Power of Mechanisms	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-12-explanatory-power-of-mechanisms
13	Digging Deeper to Find the Real Causes	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-13-digging-deeper
14	It All Started With a Big Bang	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-14-big-bang
15	Credence: Probability from Uncertainty	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-15-credence
16	What is Probabilistic Causation?	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-16-probabilistic-causation
17	Calculating Conditional Probability?	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-17-conditional-probability
18	Risky Predictions	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-18-risky-predictions
19	What RCTs Do Not Show	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-19-what-rcts-do-not-show
20	Plural Methods, One Causation?	sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-lecture-20-plural-methods-one-causation

Connections

Concepts (created / updated for this ingest):

concepts/causation — hub concept
concepts/causal-pluralism — monism vs pluralism axes
concepts/regularity-theory-of-causation — Hume
concepts/interventionist-theory-of-causation — Woodward / manipulation
concepts/dispositionalism — Anjum / Mumford / Cartwright / tendencies and powers
concepts/mechanisms-in-science — Russo-Williamson, Semmelweis, homeostasis
concepts/probabilistic-causation — credence vs frequentism vs propensity
concepts/rct-limitations — ecological fallacy, external validity, negative results
concepts/methodological-pluralism — Feyerabend, Longino
concepts/evidence-hierarchy — the EBM pyramid and its critique
concepts/philosophical-bias — Andersen, Anjum, Rocca 2019 (eLife)

Entities:

entities/rani-lill-anjum — course lead, dispositionalism, CauseHealth
entities/elena-rocca — course lead, philosophy of pharmacology
entities/nmbu — Norwegian University of Life Sciences

BPM / PPM cross-links:

concepts/predictive-process-monitoring — tendency-framed predictions (L18)
concepts/outcome-prediction — probabilities, external validity
concepts/causal-process-discovery — mechanism vs regularity in event logs
sources/2020-rama-maneiro-deep-learning-ppm-review — external-validity / benchmark critique applies
sources/2021-dumas-process-mining-2-from-insights-to-action — prescriptive monitoring as interventionist causal claim