WEBINAR – Evidential Pluralism

Building on the previous webinar that we presented last year, this session delves deeper into Evidential Pluralism…

Many interventions take place under conditions of extreme complexity, and require the integration of a broad evidence base to accurately assess their effectiveness.

Existing guidance typically takes experimental evidence, often drawn from RCTs, to be of intrinsically higher quality than other kinds of evidence and can exclude these other kinds of evidence from consideration. However, it is hard to produce high quality, blinded RCTs for many non-pharmaceutical interventions. For social policy evaluation, a new methodology that can handle a wider range of evidence is required.

In this presentation we will introduce such a methodology, based on Evidential Pluralism, a philosophical theory of causal enquiry. Evidential Pluralism offers a framework for understanding how to integrate different kinds of evidence when evaluating whether an intervention works. It yields evaluations informed by all relevant evidence, not just a small subset of experimental studies.

We will discuss a number of case studies and practical examples, showing the benefits of integrating different kinds of evidence when evaluating policy interventions.

More information about is available in our introductory guide: Integrating Diverse Evidence using Evidential Pluralism .

Presenters

Dr Joe Jones, King’s College, London
Joe Jones completed his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Kent in July 2022. He pursues interdisciplinary research across philosophy, political theory, and law. He currently holds a position in Research Impact at King’s College, London.

Dr Alexandra Trofimov, University of Kent
Alexandra Trofimov is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Philosophy at the University of Kent. Her research interests are in moral philosophy, epistemology and law. She is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded project called ‘EBL+: New Philosophical Foundations for Evidence-Based Law.

Professor Jon Williamson, University of Kent
Jon Williamson is Professor of Reasoning, Inference and Scientific Method at the University of Kent. He works on causal and probabilistic inference in science, medicine, law and AI. He has written books on establishing causal claims in medicine and the social sciences, and on probabilistic inference.

Contributor

Dr Michael Wilde, University of Kent
Michael Wilde is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. His research develops a theory of evidence to help understand how causal claims are established in the sciences. His recent co-authored book is Evaluating Evidence of Mechanisms in Medicine (Springer, 2018).

Chaired by

Jessica Ozan, UKES Council Member

Registration

In honour of our 30th Birthday, this webinar is free to all attendees!

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Slides: available only to UKES members registered for the event

Recording: this event will be recorded. Full version (with Q&A) will be made available to members only for a period of 1 year. Thereafter, Q&A will be removed and the recording made available generally.

Access Details: hosted on Zoom. Access details will be provided after the booking window closes on 2 October at 1400 BST.