"Some of the common ways of producing a false statistical argument are to quote figures without their context, omitting the cautions as to their incompleteness, or to apply them to a group of phenomena quite different to that to which they in reality relate; to take these estimates referring to only part of a group as complete; to enumerate the events favorable to an argument, omitting the other side; and to argue hastily from effect to cause, this last error being the one most often fathered on to statistics. For all these elementary mistakes in logic, statistics is held responsible." (Sir Arthur L Bowley, "Elements of Statistics", 1901)
"[...] the present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause." (Henri Bergson, "Creative Evolution", 1907)
"An exceedingly small cause which escapes
our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and
then we say the effect is due to chance. If we knew exactly the laws of nature
and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict
exactly the situation of that same universe at a succeeding moment. But even if
it were the case that the natural laws had no longer any secret for us, we
could still only know the initial situation 'approximately'. If that enabled us
to predict the succeeding situation with 'the same approximation', that is all
we require, and we should say that the phenomenon had been predicted, that it
is governed by laws. But it is not always so; it may happen that small
differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final
phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the
latter. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomenon.
(Jules H Poincaré, "Science and Method", 1908)
"To
speak of the cause of an event is therefore misleading. Any set of antecedents
from which the event can theoretically be inferred by means of correlations
might be called a cause of the event. But to speak of the cause is to imply a
uniqueness [...]." (Bertrand Russell, "Mysticism and Logic: And Other
Essays", 1910)
"It is
an enduring truth, which can never be altered, that every infraction of the Law
of nature must carry its punitive consequences with it. We can never get beyond
that range of cause and effect." (Thomas Troward, "The Edinburgh
Lectures on Mental Science", 1915)
"What
in the whole denotes a causal equilibrium process, appears for the part as a
teleological event." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 1929)
"Postulate
1. All chance systems of causes are not alike in the sense that they enable us
to predict the future in terms of the past. Postulate 2. Constant systems of
chance causes do exist in nature. Postulate 3. Assignable causes of variation
may be found and eliminated."(Walter A Shewhart, "Economic Control of
Quality of Manufactured Product", 1931)
"To apply the category of cause and effect means to find out which parts of nature stand in this relation. Similarly, to apply the gestalt category means to find out which parts of nature belong as parts to functional wholes, to discover their position in these wholes, their degree of relative independence, and the articulation of larger wholes into sub-wholes." (Kurt Koffka, 1931)
"When
the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too
large, scientific method in most cases fails us. One need only think of the
weather, in which case prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible.
Nevertheless no one doubts that we are confronted with a causal connection
whose causal components are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this domain
are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in
operation, not because of any lack of order in nature." (Albert Einstein,
"Science and Religion", 1941)
"Time itself will come to an end. For entropy points the direction of time. Entropy is the measure of randomness. When all system and order in the universe have vanished, when randomness is at its maximum, and entropy cannot be increased, when there is no longer any sequence of cause and effect, in short when the universe has run down, there will be no direction to time - there will be no time." (Lincoln Barnett, "The Universe and Dr. Einstein", 1948)
"[...] the conception of chance enters in the very first steps of scientific activity in virtue of the fact that no observation is absolutely correct. I think chance is a more fundamental conception that causality; for whether in a concrete case, a cause-effect relation holds or not can only be judged by applying the laws of chance to the observation." (Max Born, 1949)
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