-1

Is it possible in principle to ever establish or prove a causal relationship exists between two variables or events?

Peter Jordanson
  • 7
  • 1
    This is an epistemological philosophical question. Probably not suitable for this site. There are some that believe it’s impossible to know anything with certainty.

    See https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/8216/is-it-possible-to-know-anything-with-certainty

     – Jagerber48 May 17 '22 at 00:11
  • Absolute certainty? No, that's not how probability works. The best we can do is probably approximately correct learning. – J.G. May 17 '22 at 05:02
  • This question might be better suited for [philosophy.se]. – Michael Seifert May 19 '22 at 13:58

3 Answers3

2

We 'Prove' things by performing experiments.

So I would say we can prove something to within the degree of accuracy/uncertainty of the relevant experiments.

jensen paull
  • 6,624
0

To a philosopher who does not "do" science, the answer is probably no, in the sense that no philosophical viewpoint is privileged over any other.

To a physicist who does not "do" philosophy, the answer is yes, in the sense that equations have solutions.

To a recovering ex-engineer who spent 30 years debugging hi-tech production lines, the answer is yes unless some manager in the plant knows how to invoke the underdetermination of theory by evidence, in which case you are screwed.

niels nielsen
  • 92,630
0

Physics (and other sciences) proceed by drawing conclusions from empirical observations - proof belongs to mathematics. So the key question is how exactly would you observe a causal relationship ? What would it look like ?

Even if we see that whenever A happens then B also happens and vice versa, this does not establish a causal relationship between A and B - they could both be caused by some as yet unobserved event C. Or it could just be coincidence - maybe tomorrow we will observe A without B and B without A.

And the outcomes of most science experiments are far less clear cut than this. Usually they are more along the lines of “usually when we observe A we also observe B and vice versa but occasionally we observe one without the other - but this is not too surprising since we know our instruments are not infallible”.

gandalf61
  • 52,505