the most serious impediment, in my opinion, has been the fundamental gap between the vocabulary in which we cast causal questions and the traditional vocabulary in which we communicate scientific theories. To appreciate the depth of this gap, imagine the difficulties that a scientist would face in trying to express some obvious causal relationships—say, that the barometer reading B tracks the atmospheric pressure P. We can easily write down this relationship in an equation such as B = kP, where k is some constant of proportionality. The rules of algebra now permit us to rewrite this same
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