Conclusions and Final Remarks

Abstract

The basic goal of this work was to discuss different theories of causation, their difficulties, how they account for our intuitions about the concept of causation, how clearly they analyse that concept, and how they relate to each other. Apart from discussing the general virtues of each theory, I placed special focus on the way in which these theories confront different types of overdetermination cases. These cases are characterised by the feature that a given effect can be caused by more than one event. The fundamental idea defended in this work is that, in order to describe overdetermination cases appropriately, a theory of causation must appeal in some way to causal contextualism . Causal contextualism was understood as the thesis that the truth value of causal claims depends on the context in which they are evaluated. Although the notion of context has been used in this work in a loose way, the context on which causal claims depend has, as I have considered it, a basic feature: It is an epistemic rather than a metaphysical context.