I recall reading some lovely quote on this (from somebody of the old camp, who believed that talk of 'causality' was naive), but I couldn't track it down in Pearl or on Google - if anyone knows of a good quote from the old school, may it be provided.

You thinking of this maybe, quoted in the Epilogue in Pearl's Causality?

Beyond such discarded fundamentals as 'matter' and 'force' lies still another fetish among the inscrutable arcana of modern science, namely, the category of cause and effect.

That's Karl Pearson, as in "Pearson's r", the correlation coefficient.