Abstract

Ordinary language is saturated with causal concepts, with talk of tendencies, consequences, mechanisms, and a host of other thinly disguised causal terms. But ordinary language is no reliable guide to ontology, and for scientific purposes we must ask whether advanced sciences need to refer to causes in their theories and methods. Then, if we find that they do need to make such causal references, we must ask what the nature of the causal relation is and how we can discover instances of it. Here we shall reverse that order of questioning, by first laying out some standard approaches to characterizing and discovering the causal relation, and then examining whether such relations are dispensable in certain parts of science.