Inferring and Explaining

115 t ′ 0 . The expert genuinely believes what he or she said in the testimony. t ″ 0 . The expert believes what he or she said because what he or she said is true. I can only speak for myself, but I would be will- ing to grant the absolute sincerity of every expert we listened to; t ′ 0 was always my best explanation of what each witness had to say. Although I could imagine rival explanation t ′ 1 —he or she said it because he or she was paid to say it—being the most obvious, I never really felt this was what was going on. We know as a matter of simple logic, how- ever, that t ″ 0 cannot be the best explanation of what every expert testifed to, since they explic- itly contradicted each other in several instances. Labral tears can’t ofen be the result of insidious causes while at the same time almost never being the efect of them. For almost half of the expert witnesses, their sincere beliefs had to be mis- taken. Te key question, of course, was, Who was right and who was wrong? CorrelatIons and Causes exerCIses 1. When two events, A and B , are correlated (in time and space or statistically), what are the fve possible causal relationships between A and B (one of these relationships is actually not a causal one in the strict sense)? 2. Use all the steps in the IBE recipe to assess the quality of evidence in the following causal argument. Obviously Sarah’s failure to attend the lectures caused her poor philosophy grade. She has had regular absences for the past month or so, and her grade has gone down from a B+ to a C ˗ during that time period. QuIz twelVe Given what you know from the following online posting from Oregon Public Broadcasting, use all the steps in the IBE recipe to assess the quality of evidence for the claim that “Ms. Silva’s lung cancer was proximately and directly caused and its growth promoted by her exposures to the above contaminants from the Bullseye facility.” The complete article is available online at “Terminal Cancer Patient Sues Bullseye Glass in Portland.” ( https://www.opb.org/news/series/portland-oregon-air-pollution-glass/oregon -portland-bullseye-glass-terminal-cancer-patient-sues/) 7 3 Andrew E. Dessler and Edward A. Parson, Te Sci- Notes ence and Politics of Global Climate Change (Cambridge: 1 Nate Silver, Te Signal and the Noise (New York: Pen- Cambridge University Press, 2007), 59. guin, 2012), 187. 4 Dessler and Parson, Global Climate Change , 73. 2 Concise Oxford Dictionary , 6th ed. (1976), s.v. 5 Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (Emmaus: Rodale, “correlation.” 2006), 67.