The billiard-ball metaphor of causation shaped how quantitative scholars define concepts.

Evidence

One can trace the origins of the statistical, factor analytic, diseasesymptom view of concepts to basic causal views of the world common among quantitative scholars. Correlational views of causation take a billiard ball universe as their fundamental metaphor. J. S. Mill took physics as his prototypical and canonical science and most quantitative scholars have followed him. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 461

Categorization

• BMF: Consider adding Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance or Stephen Kern’s work on metaphor and causality to the reading list; the physics-envy genealogy here is a genuine cross-domain resonance rather than a library match.