whenever it’s been possible to make definite progress on ancient philosophical problems, such progress has almost always involved a [kind of] “bait-and-switch.” In other words: one replaces an unanswerable philosophical riddle Q by a “merely” scientific or mathematical question Q′, which captures part of what people have wanted to know when they’ve asked Q. Then, with luck, one solves Q′.

Yes, this is what modern causal inference did (I suppose by taking Hume's counterfactual definition of causation, and various people's efforts to deal with confounding/incompatability in data analysis as starting points).