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    Non-distinct sustaining causes, by definition, lack the c... — Carmelics
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    Supports→The principle of nondistinct sustaining causes fails to adequately capture intuitions about causes of disease

    Non-distinct sustaining causes, by definition, lack the contrastive specificity needed to explain why one individual develops disease while another does not.

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    1 reason for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Explanation requires differential causation: stating what causes disease generally cannot distinguish why person A got sick but person B did not.
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    • 2.Non-distinct causes (e.g., 'exposure to pathogen') apply equally to both diseased and non-diseased individuals, making them explanatorily incomplete.
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    • 3.Contrastive specificity—identifying differentiating factors—is logically necessary to answer 'why this case, not that one?' type questions.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Non-distinct sustaining causes can still explain disease via probabilistic mechanisms: shared causes with differing threshold sensitivities explain outcome variation.
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    • 2.Individual-level explanation and population-level causal identification serve different purposes; non-distinct causes succeed at the latter even if limited for former.
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    • 3.The claim conflates explanatory completeness with explanatory relevance: non-distinct causes explain disease occurrence even if they don't explain case-specific differences.
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    Connections

    2 topics

    Causation1 linkedBioethics1 linked

    Related

    Contrastive specificity—identifying differentiating factors—is logically necessa...Explanation requires differential causation: stating what causes disease general...Individual-level explanation and population-level causal identification serve di...Non-distinct causes (e.g., 'exposure to pathogen') apply equally to both disease...
    +3 moreShow less
    Non-distinct sustaining causes can still explain disease via probabilistic mecha...The claim conflates explanatory completeness with explanatory relevance: non-dis...The principle of nondistinct sustaining causes fails to adequately capture intui...

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