Abstract

Singular causal explanations cite explicitly, or may be paraphrased to cite explicitly, a particular factor as the cause of another particular factor. During recent years there has emerged a consensus account of the nature of an important feature of such explanations, the distinction between a factor regarded correctly in a given context of inquiry as ‘the cause’ of a given result and those other causally relevant factors, sometimes called ‘mere conditions’, which are not regarded correctly in that context of inquiry as the cause of that result. In this paper that consensus account is characterized and developed. The developed version is then used to illuminate some recent discussions of singular causal explanations.