“Force as a cause of motion is exactly on the same footing as a tree-god as a cause of growth.” More generally, Pearson belonged to a philosophical school called positivism, which holds that the universe is a product of human thought and that science is only a description of those thoughts. Thus causation, construed as an objective process that happens in the world outside the human brain, could not have any scientific meaning. Meaningful thoughts can only reflect patterns of observations, and these can be completely described by correlations. Having decided that correlation was a more
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Clearly a wrong turn and goes completely against what science is really about. It is about expanding the human perception of the world outside our current human bodies capcity to percieve, in order to better predict how the world works from causation and thus decrease the chance of death.
