Causal Ordering and Identifiability

In careful discussions of scientific methodology, particularly those carried on within a positivist or operationalist framework, it is now customary to avoid any use of the notion of causation and to speak instead of ‘functional relations’ and ‘interdependence’ among variables. This avoidance is derived, no doubt, from the role that the concept of causality has played in the history of philosophy since Aristotle, and particularly from the objectionable ontological and epistemological overtones that have attached themselves to the causal concept over the course of that history.