However, in the discourse of social science, and in most everyday conversations, a claim to understand something is a claim to understand what causes that thing. The sociologists who collected and studied the thousands of variables in the Fragile Families study were looking for the causes of the outcomes they observed. Physicians who understand what ails a patient are claiming that the pathology they have diagnosed is the cause of the symptoms they have observed. To understand is to describe a causal chain. The ability to make a prediction is a measure of whether such a causal chain has indeed
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