Julian Reiss (2015), Philosophy of Science, 82(3), 341–362 (July 2015) — DOI-10.1086/681643
Key takeaways
- Alongside the well-theorized “experimentalist” approach to evidence (Bacon, Mill, RCTs), biomedical and social science use a pragmatist approach that had never been articulated; Reiss develops it as a theory and supports it with the 1950s smoking–lung cancer controversy.
Seeded from the abstract alone, before the reading in NOTE-197. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Reiss identifies two competing approaches to evidential reasoning in the biomedical and social sciences: experimental and pragmatist. Experimentalism has had extensive philosophical analysis and support from Bacon and Mill to recent work on causation and evidence. Pragmatism about evidence has been neither articulated nor defended. The paper sets out to fill that gap by developing a theory of pragmatist evidence, illustrated and supported with a case study of the 1950s controversy over smoking and lung cancer.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 25 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-197 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the clearest short statement of an eliminativist, anti-hierarchy account of evidence that works for observational science, and of how values and trust set stopping rules. Its grades of warrant and pragmatic guidelines are proposals illustrated on one historical case, not validated criteria.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-197, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — 25 s dwell and a foundational statement of the anti-hierarchy view. The full text was unreachable, so the theory itself is unread.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-197 is that reading):
- The smoking case is the classic instance of establishing causation without experiments, and it is relevant to how the anthology treats observational evidence, such as large-scale ablations and correlational scaling studies, when controlled experiments are infeasible.
- Check the theory’s core. From Reiss’s other work I expect evidence to be defined relative to a hypothesis and context, with warrant coming from eliminating alternative explanations, but I have not verified that against this paper.
- Read with Cartwright (LIT-213) and Worrall (LIT-175), who reach overlapping conclusions from different directions.
Access when seeded: The captured URL is JSTOR stable/10.1086/681643, which I did not fetch. The Cambridge Core landing page (via curl) gave the abstract and vol. 82(3), pp. 341–362, July 2015, but its PDF link returned the landing page, and Cambridge’s “online 2022-01-01” is a platform-migration date. published: uses 2015-05-27 from Unpaywall, apparently the original University of Chicago Press online date; I did not verify it at the publisher. The Durham repository accepted manuscript returned 403, and PhilPapers is behind Cloudflare. Keywords are mine.