Can Evidential Pluralism mitigate bias and motivated reasoning?

This paper defends Evidential Pluralism, a philosophical account of causal enquiry, against the concern that it is particularly prone to bias and motivated reasoning. Evidential Pluralism scrutinises mechanistic studies alongside the comparative studies considered by the evaluation methods at the heart of orthodox evidence-based medicine and evidence-based policy. Concerns have been raised that mechanistic studies, and therefore Evidential Pluralism itself, are particularly prone to bias. We present a range of considerations to show that this is not the case.