Everything must have a reason or cause.
Leibniz's principle. Its cost is that it licenses demanding an explanation where none exists, which is why it sits uneasily with quantum mechanics and with genuinely stochastic processes.
In practice
- A quality manager asks why a batch failed and gets a defensible answer; asks why that batch and not the eleven identical ones, and gets a story.
- A post-incident review that insists every anomaly had a cause will manufacture one, which is where the root cause fallacy comes from.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- Rules for weighing claims