Well if you want something like the actual history... we have francis bacon getting us close to an abductive (ie., explanatory) method, decartes helped a bit --

Well if you want something like the actual history... we have francis bacon getting us close to an abductive (ie., explanatory) method, decartes helped a bit -- then a great catastrophe befell science called Hume. Since Hume it become popular to somehow rig measurement to make it necessarily informative (Kant), or to claim that measurement has no necessarily informative relation to reality at all (in the end, Russell, Ayer et al.). It took a while to dig out of that nightmarish hole that philosophers largely created, back into the cold light of experimental reality. It wasnt statisticians who made the mess; it was first philosophers, and today, people learning statistical methods without learning statistics at all. Thankfully philosophers started actually reading science, and then they realised they'd go it all wrong. So today, professional research philosophy is allied against the forces of nonsense. As far as the success of causal explanations, you owe to that everything, including the very machine which runs ChatGPT. That we can make little trinkets on association alone pales in comparison to what we have done by knowing how the world works.