The Why of Things: Causality in Science, Medicine, and Life
Peter Rabins
Abstract
Why was there a meltdown at the Fukushima power plant? Why do some people get cancer and not others? Why is global warming happening? Why does one person get depressed in the face of life's vicissitudes while another finds resilience? Questions like these—questions of causality—form the basis of modern scientific inquiry, posing profound intellectual and methodological challenges for researchers in the physical, natural, biomedical, and social sciences. This book offers a conceptual framework for analyzing daunting questions of causality. The text maps a three-facet model of causality and appl ... More
Why was there a meltdown at the Fukushima power plant? Why do some people get cancer and not others? Why is global warming happening? Why does one person get depressed in the face of life's vicissitudes while another finds resilience? Questions like these—questions of causality—form the basis of modern scientific inquiry, posing profound intellectual and methodological challenges for researchers in the physical, natural, biomedical, and social sciences. This book offers a conceptual framework for analyzing daunting questions of causality. The text maps a three-facet model of causality and applies it to a variety of questions in science, medicine, economics, and more. The text situates its argument within relevant scientific contexts, such as quantum mechanics, cybernetics, chaos theory, and epigenetics.
Keywords:
cancer,
Fukushima,
global warming,
causality,
scientific contexts,
quantum mechanics,
cybernetics,
chaos theory,
epigenetics
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231164726 |
Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231164726.001.0001 |