Specificity of Association in Epidemiology

Jan 1, 2022·
Thomas Blanchard
Thomas Blanchard
· 0 min read
Abstract
The epidemiologist Bradford Hill famously argued that in epidemiology, specificity of association (roughly, the fact that an environmental or behavioral risk factor is associated with just one or at most a few medical outcomes) is strong evidence of causation. Prominent epidemiologists have dismissed Hill’s claim on the ground that it relies on a dubious ‘one-cause one effect’ model of disease causation. The paper examines this methodological controversy, and argues that specificity considerations do have a useful role to play in causal inference in epidemiology.
Type
Publication
Synthese, 200(482)
publication
Thomas Blanchard
Authors
Thomas Blanchard
Maître de Conférences en Philosophie

I am Associate Professor in the philosophy department at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy and psychology in the Concepts and Cognition Lab at UC-Berkeley for the Varieties of Understanding Project, an Assistant Professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and an Akademischer Rat (roughly equivalent to assistant professor) at the University of Cologne. I received my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2014.

My research is in the philosophy of science, and focuses mainly on causation, causal modeling and causal explanation. I am interested in a wide variety of issues concerning causation including causal asymmetries, levels of causal explanation, the causal exclusion problem, the epistemology of causal inference, causal cognition, and causal decision theory. My work also investigates the use of certain causal concepts and assumptions in particular sciences such as biology, epidemiology and medicine.