Three ways of worrying about ‘ causation ’ 1 For

Russell (1913) famously characterised the “law of causality” as a harmful “relic of a bygone age”, and urged the “complete extrusion” of the word ‘cause’ from the philosophical vocabulary. His justification for this proposal is, in large part, the descriptive claim that physicists, in particular, but more generally the practitioners of any ‘advanced’ science, do not in fact seek causes, conjoined with the view that it is no part of the proper business of philosophy to legislate to the effect that they should. The descriptive claim that ‘advanced’ sciences do not seek causes depends partly on a specific construal of cause seeking, as the quest for, or assumption of the existence of, “invariable uniformities of sequence” (1918: 188). It is these uniformities, according to Russell, that belief in the ‘law of causality’ leads us, erroneously, to expect and also to prize. It is these aspects of Russell’s paper that provide our point of departure.