The why of things : causality in science, medicine, and life / Peter V. Rabins ; jacket design, Marc J. Cohen.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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. In this groundbreaking book, noted psychiatrist and author Peter Rabins offers a conceptual framework for analyzing daunting questions of causality. Navigating a lively intellectual voyage between the shoals of strict reductionism and relativism, Rabins maps a three-facet model of causality and applies it to a variety of questions in science, medicine, economics, and more.

Throughout this book, Rabins situates his argument within relevant scientific contexts, such as quantum mechanics, cybernetics, chaos theory, and epigenetics. A renowned communicator of complex concepts and scientific ideas, Rabins helps readers stretch their minds beyond the realm of popular literary tipping points, blinks, and freakonomic explanations of the world.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Reasoning about causality is ubiquitous in the sciences and everyday life. Psychiatrist Rabins (Johns Hopkins Univ.) articulates a three-pronged interpretive framework to comprehend this complex landscape. The first is models for the nature of causal relationships: categorical (yes/no), probabilistic (degrees), and emergent (nonlinear). Second, the author considers levels of analysis for types of causes, taking his cue from Aristotle's account of causal explanation: predisposing, precipitating, programmatic, and purposive. Finally, the framework involves the logics of causal demonstration: empirical or experimental, empathic or narrative/historical, and ecclesiastical or divine authority. Although this pluralist framework is explicated thoroughly with examples from methodologies across different sciences and neatly demonstrates the need to approach causality from many angles, the exposition suffers from many missteps, some due to neglect of relevant literature. Examples include misinterpretations of scientific principles and the methods of historical figures, a cartoon picture of induction, a conflation of probabilistic reasoning and causality, and misunderstandings of functional, phylogenetic, reductionist, and stochastic reasoning in biology. Additionally, the ecclesiastical logic sits uncomfortably within the overall framework, which exposes a question that remains unaddressed: how do people decide between competing causal claims? Summing Up: Optional. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates and general readers. A. C. Love University of Minnesota