Causation, Truth, and the Law

Deciding matters of legal liability, in torts and other civil actions, requires deciding causation. The injury suffered by a plaintiff must be caused by an event or condition due to the defendant. The courts distinguish between cause-in-fact and proximate causation, where cause-in-fact is determined by the “but-for” test: the effect would not have happened, “but for” the cause.1 Proximate causation is a set of legal limitations on cause-in-fact. As this conference is entitled A Cross-Disciplinary Look at Scientific Truth: What’s the Law to Do, I will ignore the distinction between cause-in-fact and proximate causation, and instead focus on both the sense in which cause-in-fact claims can be considered true or false and on the challenges to establishing them. Before a court can decide on proximate causation, and thus on liability or damages, it must decide on the truth of the cause-in-fact question: Was the injury suffered by the plaintiff caused by the action(s) of the defendant? For example, was John Smith’s liver cancer caused by his exposure to trichloroethylene (“TCE”) in a factory that employed him for ten years? I will focus on what we must assume before cause-infact claims can even be said to have a truth value, that is, objectively true or false independent of whether we can know it. Philosophers distinguish individual level causal claims (cause-in-fact claims) from “general causal claims.”2 I will try to