Causal Pluralism

Abstract

AbstractCausal pluralism is the view that causation is not a single kind of relation or connection between things in the world. Instead, the apparently simple and univocal term ‘cause’ is seen as masking an underlying diversity. Assessing such a claim requires making sense of a difficult counting operation. How do we tell whether a theory of causation is identifying causation with a ‘single’ kind of connection? In practice, there tends not to be much disagreement about how to do the counting, because most philosophical work on causation has sought a view with an obvious kind of unity. The literature often works with a standard range of candidate connections that seem to have an important link to the idea of causation.