Causal Reasoning Quotes

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.

My theory stands as firm as a rock; every arrow directed against it will return quickly to its archer. How do I know this? Because I have studied it from all sides for many years; because I have examined all objections which have ever been made against the infinite numbers; and above all because I have followed its roots, so to speak, to the first infallible cause of all created things.

If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon.

The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.

Because humans are capable of choosing, the first cause that created them must have a will.

The thing about looking back over Clinton's presidency, and probably anybody's presidency, is that when you look back, the events all line up in a way that makes sense. At the time, you don't know where it's going.

Thou shalt not believe something just because you can explain it.

As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after.

To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature.

Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken

Just because there's glass on the road don't mean there's been an accident.

Logic cannot model causal systems, and paradox is generated when time is ignored [as in logic].

Moreover, joint occurrences tend to be better recalled than instances when the effect does not occur. The proneness to remember confirming instances, but to overlook disconfirming ones, further serves to convert, in thought, coincidences into causalities.

The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time - of one thing preceding another - the effort to establish causality is a mug's game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions.

Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.

When companies are successful or not successful, they almost immediately jump to the wrong conclusions about how they got there or why they got there.

30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops an does naught. 31. If power asks why, then power is weakness.

A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed.

It's malarkey. When you tell people that the roof crushing in on your head is not the cause of injury, it's your head hitting the roof, it's laughable.

...things are the way they are in our universe because if they weren't, we wouldn't be here to notice.

Since we think we understand when we know the explanation, and there are four types of explanation (one, what it is to be a thing; one, that if certain things hold it is necessary that this does; another, what initiated the change; and fourth, the aim), all these are proved through the middle term.

To know truly is to know by causes.

The way evolution always discovers reasons is by retroactive endorsement.