PHIL 12 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Randomized Controlled Trial, Cervical Cancer, Influenza Vaccine
Document Summary
Phil 12 lecture 10 mill"s methods and the rct. Mill"s methods: five different methods for inferring causes from a set of phenomena, method of agreement, method of difference, joint method of agreement and difference, method of concomitant variation, method of residues, we won"t study this one. Nobody gets the flu: would it be safe to infer that the vaccine is effective at preventing the flu, maybe the flu doesn"t go there. If some people do develop the flu who have been vaccinated, then maybe it doesn"t work/vice versa. The method of difference: ex: of two twin siblings in a remote community, one eats the flu shot and the other doesn"t. The one who doesn"t get the shot gets the flu, and not the other one. Impractical: only considers cases two at a time, but, the more cases we have, the more evidence we have. Some of these guests go on to have desert.
