Pretty much the title
In: 210
Absolutely, for example you could posit that dropping apples results in apples falling. You may not know WHY dropped apples do that, but you can prove that they do.
Yes. We know gravity is a thing, but we have no idea how it works. People were studying inheritance long before they knew what genes were. They even knew that sex caused babies, without understanding sperm and eggs.
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Not really. Not strictly, anyway.
If you don’t know the underlying mechanism, it’s still fully possible that correlated events are caused by some shared, underlying influence. If you can’t eliminate this possibility, you can’t confidently claim causation.
Yes. A number of societies got fairly sophisticated in metallurgy, for instance, even though they had no idea what was happening on the atomic level, or even that atoms existed.
Yes. In fact, much of science consists in searching the causal mechanism for causations that were already established. We typically observe that some phenomenon causes or is caused by another before figuring out how.
Sometimes we don’t even know how things work before we put them to use! Vaccines are an example, as people understood that limited exposure to some diseases could provide immunity centuries before they understood *how*.
Without knowing the underlying mechanics the biggest difficulty is determining whether one causes the other or if they share a common cause
Sure.
Perhaps the first and most flameouts is Koch’s Postulates, which were proposed to determine if a bacteria caused a disease. Nothing about causal mechanism. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3775492/#:~:text=As%20originally%20stated%2C%20the%20four,%3B%20and%20finally%20(4)%20The
Even today, if Koch’s postulates are met, causation would be widely accepted as shown.
I guarantee the people in here arguing semantics are either philosophers (respect, philosophy is super important) or just giving their own opinion. They are not researchers.
In the of practice science, or at least in the biology research that I am familiar with, causation is established without a causal mechanism all the time. We use the terms **necessary** and **sufficient** to distinguish different types of causation.
To give an extremely common example (gazillions of studies have used this approach), if you delete a gene from an organism, and that organism loses a trait (simplifying here) compared to its unmodified kin, that gene was **necessary** to cause that trait. If you then put that gene in a related but different organism that lacks the trait, and it gains the trait, then that gene was also **sufficient** to cause that trait.
**Necessary but not sufficient** genes are the norm, **necessary and sufficient** genes are great to find because you are really getting to the root of things, and **sufficient but not necessary** genes occur when the organism has some redundancy built into its genome, which is not uncommon. In all three of these cases, the gene causes the trait in a different way.
But even after you have done all this, you still have no idea of the mechanism! It takes a lot more work to figure out what protein (or functional RNA) the gene codes for, and how that protein leads to the trait. This is much harder.
The answer is no. Science requires a hypothesis, experiment/observation, and a result. If you cannot observe a causal mechanism, then you cannot establish causation.
From a philosophical perspective, however, you can establish causation, using evidence from science, without knowing the exact causal mechanism. This is an example of a philosophical argument that establishes causation without commenting on the mechanism:
1. Things that begin to exist have a cause.
2. The Universe began to exist.
3. The Universe has a cause.
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