Eli5: In science, can you establish causation without knowing the causal mechanism?

Question

Pretty much the title

In: 210

Answer 1

It depends on what you classify as “science”. For the most exacting definitions, there is no causation, just “necessary and sufficient predicates”: if such and such occurs, then some certain thing occurs. “Causation” is, in this view, nothing more than a statistically significant correlation, and scientific theories (which are the formulas used to make quantitative predictions, not the explanations of “why” those formulas work) are *effective theories”, which means that whether the supposed entities that are used to describe “how” something happens are real is irrelevant, and potentially fictional; all that matters (pun intended) is whether the formulas work.