The Linguistic Expression of Causation
نویسنده
چکیده
The main claim of this paper is that causation, as commonly understood in the philosophical and psychological literature, is not fully expressed in natural language predicates. It neither matches the syntactic structure they project nor their lexical semantics. What a predicate can do is emulate causation by other means, albeit imperfectly. As a point of departure, we should provide a definition of causation. Any theory of causation (in the general sense, rather than the narrow linguistic sense) adopts the clauses in (1a) and (1b) below. In addition, a dependency must hold between the causing event and the caused event, in that the caused event takes place as a consequence of the causing event. Perhaps the best-known formulation of this dependency is due to Lewis‟s (1973) counterfactual theory of causation, which can be summarized as in (1c).
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