Reply #42: No, association isn't causation.

[Igel]

I learned that in junior high (thank you Mr. Eibner!), and I don't think I even hinted that association was causation.

But most researchers when they find an association try to figure out what the causal relationship might be, if there is one, or if both are caused by some underlying factor. That's usually the reason to try to find an association; and if you find one and can't say something interesting about it except "hey, lookee here!", you publish hoping somebody else finds the connection--or tries to replicate your study and fails.

Unless you're in psycholinguistics, in which case there's almost no hope of establishing causality for many things, given the complexity of the system; all you really expect to do is find interesting things to say 'lookee here!' about, or poke holes in the theories of Chomsky and his students. But we hope anyway.


What you say is possible. There are other possibilities, of course.