Luis Mireles-Flores: A Multi-Stage approach to the role of evidence in policymaking: opening the black-box of the public policy process

Tuesday October 13 2026 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
In recent decades, philosophers concerned with how scientific knowledge interacts with social and policy issues have been investigating the varieties, and epistemic particularities of different forms of causal evidence and evidential methods employed in scientific practice. This has led to an extremely valuable collection of epistemological insights and accounts of scientific evidence, evidential diversity, causal inference, extrapolation, and other causality-related topics, together with philosophical elaborations on how these insights could have implications for policy making (e.g., Cartwright 2006, 2009, 2012; Cartwright and Hardie 2012; Shan and Williamson 2021, 2023).

The existing accounts have made significant contributions to our understanding of the epistemic virtues and limitations of different kinds of evidence and inferential methods that are employed to support policy-oriented causal claims that could be relevant to support decisions about policy interventions. However, this literature has focused on unpacking and assessing the roles of causality and evidence mainly on the scientific side of the science-policy interaction, leaving the details of what happens at the policy-making side of the interaction relatively unexplored. The policy process is left in a black-box, so to speak.

To illustrate how this situation is potentially limiting and should be of concern, I review two influential accounts of evidence for policy: Shan and Williamson’s evidential pluralism and Cartwright’s evidence for use. Then, as an alternative perspective, I put forward a Multi-Stage approach to the role of evidence in policy making: an approach that understands policy making as a dynamic process with several stages, and that proceeds from the characterization of policy problems, to the examination of how causal notions and evidential methods can contribute in various ways to the specific evidential needs and challenges that emerge at each stage of the public policy process.

The Multi-Stage approach is meant to offer an expansion of the possibilities of research for philosophers interested in the policy relevance of scientific knowledge. By considering and interpreting policy making as a process with clear stages (and each stage with distinct aims and requirements), researchers can analyse and assess separately and more precisely how different types of causal knowledge, evidential methods, or contextual factors are more or less relevant, in which ways, and to which extent, to the specific aims and evidential requirements emerging at each of the different stages of the policy process.

Bio
Luis Mireles Flores is academic researcher at TINT (Centre for Philosophy of Social Science) at the University of Helsinki since 2016. He is currently Academy of Finland Fellow and the principal investigator of the project “Causality, Empirical Economics, and the Economy: New Perspectives on Causal Inference for Policy Purposes”, funded by the Research Council of Finland. His areas of specialization include philosophy of economics and the social sciences, philosophy of causal inference, political economy, and the history of economic analysis. He has held visiting positions at the Faculty of Economics at Hokkaido University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. During his doctoral studies, he co-founded and served as editor of the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE).