ABSTRACT
Phyllis Illari and Federica Russo's emphasis is on what they call a “cheerful conceptual pluralism” of causal modeling. Illari and Russo propose a pluralism of pluralisms: of types of causing, of concepts of causation, of types of inferences, of sources of evidence, and of measures for causal inference. The notion of causal pluralism in the health sciences might require more than support for the contention that the roles causal factors play in the story of illness occurrence are fundamentally different. The etiological stance envisions illness occurrence to be the culmination of a sequence of overlapping processes, the causation process and the disease process. A much more interesting way to think about fundamental differences between illness causation processes is to think about fundamental differences between pathogenetic mechanisms. Inflammation-associated cytokines are proteins that are released by white blood cells in response to an infectious stimulus and which can produce tissue damage by leading to cell necrosis.
