ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the papers by Federica Russo and Jon Williamson that proposed the Russo–Williamson thesis (RWT). It discusses criticism offered by others. Between 2007 and 2011, Russo and Williamson published three papers that, taken together, established and elaborated on what is now known as the RWT. In their first paper, Russo and Williamson begin by stating that the health sciences target two kinds of causes, that is, causes of disease and of effective treatment. Russo and Williamson explain that by “probabilistic and mechanistic evidence” they refer to statistical correlations and biological changes at the microscopic level. In their second paper, Russo and Williamson turn to the distinction between generic/single-case causality, a kind of type/token distinction, as in “smoking causes lung cancer” versus “Harry's smoking caused his lung cancer”. Donald Gillies suggests a reformulation of the RWT because he thinks that two distinctions need to be appreciated.
