Nancy Cartwright was awarded this grant by the AHRC with Eileen Munro from the London School of Economics to study the evidence for singular causal claims. The practical application for this is to cases where one has to predict if an intervention will have its targeted effect in a particular case or determine afterwards whether the intervention has had the targeted effect. Cartwright and Munro will use a child protection programme called Signs of Safety as a case study to test their ideas’ successes and failures. The Theory of Change of Signs of Safety includes wider systemic changes that are needed to support change in direct work with families. Munro has been conducting action research on its implementation in the UK and Ireland. The outputs of this project are expected to be academic outputs (a book, and a journal article) as well as a user-friendly guide to disseminate in a practitioners’ workshop.
Sarah Wieten and Nancy Cartwright are co-investigators in a 12-month BA-funded project led by Prof Alex Broadbent and the joint University-of-Johannesburg / Durham-University Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine and Public Health (CPEMPH). Besides CPEMH and CHESS the project also includes the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Interdisciplinary Centre for Digital Futures, South Africa. A central aim is to figure out how to integrate two important kinds of evidence — model-based evidence and social listening reports -- into a general evidence-use framework (ERMF --Evidence-Role-Maps Framework) developed at CHESS, using South African public health policy as a context. The project should both provide policymakers with actionable tools for designing, implementing, and learning from interventions grounded in contextually relevant evidence and also produce an extended ERMF.
Since May 2025 CHESS has had a three-year Leverhulme Research Fellow, Francesca Bellazzi. Bellazzi intends to study molecular functions - the fundamental role that they play in understanding how life relates to physicochemical properties - and develop a new philosophical account of functions at the molecular scale. The results of this project are relevant for life and medical sciences and include how we can use molecules as technologies within living systems. She will be collaborating with Robin Hendry, who has worked extensively on theories of structure in chemistry, a key contrast to function. Bellazzi’s work will provide new conceptual tools for philosophers, but also for bioscientists, and also contribute a book and five research articles to the emerging field of philosophy of biochemistry.
Nancy Cartwright is also involved in the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life (CAL), a new 10-year interdisciplinary Centre, under the direction of Louise Amoore, Professor of Political Geography. The Centre is based at Durham with four collaborating institutions in Amsterdam, Edinburgh, North Carolina and York. It aims to address the central question, 'How do we want to live with algorithmic technologies?' including machine learning and artificial intelligence. Nancy will have oversight of the Fellows Knowledge Exchange from the philosophy and history of science point of view.
What counts as objectively good evidence for a scientific claim or a policy prediction? Or rather, since ‘evidence’ is often seen to include only empirical findings, what counts as objectively good reasons? This has been one of the central research questions throughout CHESS history, one which we continue to address today. Descriptions of a lot of our past work can be found in the CHESS Working Paper (CWP) series.
Much of this research has focussed on better evidence for evidence-informed social policy, where we have addressed practical issues in a number of different policy domains, including
Given the current emphasis on RCTs (randomised controlled trials) in evidence-based policy, it should be no surprise that we have worked specifically on their uses and abuses in warranting policies (see Objectivity in Science and Law: A Shared Rescue Strategy).
There has also been a good deal of attention lately to how to ensure that the introduction of values into scientific endeavours – which many argue is unavoidable – can be done without undermining objectivity, to which we have contributed (see Modelling Objectively).
In addition we have worked on what more generally constitutes objectivity in scientific and science influenced endeavours, including issues of objectivity for social activist research (see Objectivity – What it is for, when we can have it and when we can’t) and on general questions surrounding what counts as good evidence in these areas (see Theory and Evidence in Economics).
The physical sciences have traditionally been central objects of study for the history and philosophy of science, which has seen them as a source of paradigm cases of how empirical knowledge and understanding grow and change. CHESS is the centre of an interdisciplinary group of philosophers, historians and scientists who seek to continue that work, but with a different focus. Philosophers have tended to limit their attention to the most fundamental parts of physics such as relativity and quantum mechanics. We focus instead on non-fundamental physical sciences, and especially chemistry and condensed matter physics.
CHESS has a robust research community in the History and Philosophy of Medicine, including specialists in histories of psychiatry, medical ethics, histories of epidemic disease, postcolonial histories of medicine, global health, and history and philosophy of epidemiology. Professor Maehle's work on medical psychology and psychoanalysis in the 19th and early 20th centuries for a new book 'Freud's Berlin Rival: Albert Moll and his Psychology' examines the development of a key psychiatric practice and its contested scope and ethics; recent work by Professor Eddy and Dr Webster in the history of medicine in the British Empire has led to publications in the areas of medical technologies and information organization among black medical professionals (Eddy) and studies in the socio-ecology and epidemiology of infectious disease in port cities of the British Empire, spanning India, Australia, and Ireland (Webster). Dr Coreen McGuire specializes in disability history and histories of measurement in Medicine, and runs (alongside Professor Alex Broadbent) the Measurement Lab through the Institute for Medical Humanities.
The group also contains significant strengths in the philosophy of medicine and epidemiology, especially related to epidemic response and the practices of science-in-action. Dr Wieten specialises in epistemology and clinical ethics, alongside work in methods of epidemiology and economics, and has recently published on the causal assumptions of DAGs and evidence assessment in COVID-19 health policy impact evaluation. Dr Katherine Furman is a philosopher of health policy, and examines knowledge-creation and epistemologies of epidemic response, drawing on both historical and contemporary case studies; meanwhile Sam Colclough and Dr Deb Marber examine the scientific response to COVID-19 in the UK as a site for understanding how the production of scientific knowledge is politically mediated, with a particular focus on the ways and extent to which politics became embedded in the knowledge claims made by the UK scientific advisory community during the pandemic. Despite these wide-ranging interests, members of this research cluster share strong common interests in questions of methodology and epistemology, knowledge formation in medicine, and the translation of medical evidence to health policy and practice.
The following projects have their own pages (click on the title)
Our aim in this project has been to examine the role of intellectual humility, and its corresponding vices of intellectual arrogance or hubris on the one hand and excessive doubt or diffidence on the other, in some of the successes and failures of science from the early modern period to the present.
Ruth First was a leading light in the campaign against the South African apartheid regime. She took up a lecturer post in the Department of Sociology and Social Administration at Durham in 1973, teaching a new course on development studies and raising feminist issues. We engaged with Ruth First's legacy in two academic research projects.
EURiCA is a 3yr Leverhulme-Trust-funded research project running 2021-24, where ‘EURiCA’ stands for ‘Exploring Uncertainty and Risk in Contemporary Astrobiology’.
This pilot project (running 2022-23) sets out to determine the viability of an ‘Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus’ (IASC)’. The concept scientific fact is linked to a solid, international scientific consensus, with the 2022 monograph Identifying Future-Proof Science serving as a major piece of underpinning research. So understood, ‘future-proof’ scientific facts (such as ‘We live in a spiral galaxy’) are to be identified primarily by measuring the strength of the scientific consensus, but also by investigating epistemic virtues and vices of the relevant community of experts. In a pre-pilot-study at Durham University (UK) during June 2022, a new method was tested out on 361 scientists, whereby one could, in principle, access the opinions of many tens of thousands of scientists, on any scientific question of interest, within a few days. Such a thing has never before been possible, and it could have major ramifications for anyone who might benefit from better understanding what is, and isn’t, an established ‘scientific fact’, including scientists themselves, policy makers, and the general public.
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