Funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
CHESS’s mission is to integrate work from the humanities and the social and natural sciences to understand better how to improve societies. In particular, to investigate what kinds of academic knowledge — ‘science’ in the German sense — can best inform policy and practice, what methods will produce this knowledge and how this knowledge should be put to use. Causal knowledge is clearly vital here. Past work at CHESS in this area has focussed on causal modelling and causal inference. Our current concern is with the use of knowledge to make better assessments of causal effects, especially the effects of social policies. How can you predict if a policy intervention will have its targeted effect in a particular case, or determine afterwards whether it has done so?
Our focus is on warrant for singular causal claims: claims that one thing was/will be the cause of another. Our project begins from the assumption that to provide evidence for something, you need a solid understanding of what that something is like. But, surprisingly, there is no well-developed account of singular causation available. So we are working to develop a rich well-grounded account of singular causation, identifying features useful for evidencing singular claims.
The current work is sponsored by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, with a grant to philosopher Nancy Cartwright (CHESS co-director, Durham) and child protection expert Eileen Munro (emeritus professor, LSE), with Dr Brendan Kelters working as postdoctoral research associate.
To aid in the collection and processing of evidence, we aim to provide user-friendly templates for what we call ‘evidence-role maps’: maps charting what role each piece of evidence plays in supporting an overall judgment. To assure that our account is sufficiently rich and detailed to constrain how to apply it practically we are developing our theoretical analysis with application to a case study, a child protection programme, Signs of Safety, with which Professor Munro has been involved as a researcher. We aim to construct evidence-role maps for the implementation of Signs of Safety that are of practical use to those designing implementation strategies in identifying and assessing evidence about whether or how it can be implemented successfully in a targeted context and what changes might be needed to increase the likelihood of success. This will serve as a test of our general template and an exemplar for other domains.