Causal Understanding Quotes

The why is what makes journalism an adult game. The why is what makes policy coherent and useful. The why is what transforms bureaucrats and foot soldiers and political leaders into viable instruments of rational and affirmative change. The why is everything and without it, the very suggestion of human progress becomes a cosmic joke.

It is not my prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.

Here and elsewhere we shall not obtain the best insight into things until we actually see them growing from the beginning.

Rule of science: only exclude purpose, and Nature will reveal her causes.

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.

Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality - a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.

People's conceptions about themselves and the nature of things are developed and verified through four different processes: direct experience of the effects produced by their actions, vicarious experience of the effects produced by somebody else's actions, judgments voiced by others, and derivation of further knowledge from what they already know by using rules of inference

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.

Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.

Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children.

The mind has greater power over the emotions, and is less subject thereto, insofar as it understands all things to be necessary.

Once you can reproduce a phenomenon, you are well on the way to understanding it.

We are all trained to be data driven people, but no hard data exist about the future. Therefore, the only way to look into the future with any degree of accuracy is to use theory, statements of what causes what and why. If executives have the right theories in their heads, they can very quickly interpret market developments. They can identify what matters and why, and act accordingly. So we suggest decision-makers should start by gaining a deep understanding of the relevant collection of theories, and then be alert for signals that indicate certain types of developments.

It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control.

As soon as the circumstances of an experiment are well known, we stop gathering statistics. ... The effect will occur always without exception, because the cause of the phenomena is accurately defined. Only when a phenomenon includes conditions as yet undefined,Only when a phenomenon includes conditions as yet undefined, can we compile statistics. ... we must learn therefore that we compile statistics only when we cannot possibly help it; for in my opinion, statistics can never yield scientific truth.

Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.

In order to say that some function is understood, every relevant step in the process must be elucidated.

When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.