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

790 views

Pretty much the title

In: 210

31 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yeah sure. For instance we know that tylenol treats inflammation and fever, but we have absolutely no idea how. There are lots of cause-and-effect relationships where we don’t understand the full mechanism behind it. The main issue is being careful to actually prove that it’s “cause and effect” and not “correlation”. Because if it’s just a correlation, there could be other important factors we’re missing that are actually causing the effect.

You are viewing 1 out of 31 answers, click here to view all answers.