Abstract

This chapter focuses on the connection between counterfactuals and causation, and on the use of causation in the analyses of other concepts, especially decision and dispositions. It briefly reviews two preliminary pieces of conceptual apparatus. The chapter divides Lewis's treatment of causation into three stages: The first is the theory presented in the 1973 paper "Causation.” The second includes the amendments included in postscripts to “Causation” in Philosophical Papers, Volume II, in 1986.The final stage is the theory from "Causation as Influence". Lewis introduced a number of subsidiary concepts: causal dependence among families of events, causal dependence among individual events, chancy causal dependence, quasi‐dependence, influence. The chapter presents a family tree of concepts, with causal dependence among families of variables at the trunk. These concepts are developed by Lewis in his attempts to analyze causation, and in his attempts to provide causal accounts of rational decision and dispositions.