In his article 'Causal Discovery Using Adaptive Logics' (1), Maarten Van Dyck proposed a logic that allows one to derive causal statements from probabilistic information. This causal logic is adaptive. One of his purposes in using this sort of logic is trying to get a grip on how humans reason from association to causation. All adaptive logics indeed serve the common goal of formalizing real life reasoning processes. Our purpose in this talk is trying to demonstrate that Van Dyck's adaptive logic for causal discovery (henceforth ALcd) does reach this goal quite well, by providing two illustrations from the field of social sciences. As a first and simple application of ALcd we use the formalization of a hypothetical study presented by Schutt (3). The hypothetical study investigates the relationship between attending a boot camp during imprisonment and the likelihood of recidivism after release. Afterwards we will present a more elaborate illustration using a real investigation, namely a study of Kirby (2) about the causal pathways of the influence of parental separation on smoking initiation in adolescents. This second example will illustrate that ALcd not only enables us to formalize the reasoning process from data the results, but also helps to clarify the heuristic process of researchers. <br /><br />(1) Maarten Van Dyck. Causal discovery using adaptive logics, 2002. (2) James Kirby. The influence of parental separation on smoking initiation in adolescents. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 43: 56-71, 2002 (3) Russel K. Schutt (ed.). Investigating the Social World. The Process and Practice of Research. Pine Forge: Thousand Oaks, 1996.