Abstract
This essay deals with the issue of causality in epidemiology from the 1970s onwards, whose starting point adopted here was the publication of The Causal Thinking in Health Sciences by M. Susser, up to the present day, seeking to list the various philosophical, theoretical and methods that throughout these 50 years have sought to reflect on the problem of causality in the discipline, in view of the predominance of observational research in the field. Starting from Susser’s seminal contribution, several movements were discussed as well as their criticisms, such as the proposal to adopt Popperian logic on the 1980s, the criticism of multicausal models and the ecosocial theory proposed by N. Krieger in the 1990s, criticism of social epidemiology also in the 1990s, the influence of J.Pearl and the adoption of directed acyclic graphs as a new tool in the issue of causality. The so-called methodological revolution at the beginning of this century and the criticism of philosophers and epidemiologists to this reductionist approach were also reviewed, as well as the alternatives proposed in the last 10 years, including the inferentialist perspective, the triangulation of methods and the defense of social epidemiology and their determination models.
Keywords:
Epistemology; Causality; Directed acyclic graphs; Triangulation; Social epidemiology