Causal Pluralism and Force Dynamics

Causal relations permeate human knowledge across a wide range of domains, from the physical to the abstract. The existence of causal relations in many different domains raises an interesting challenge for accounts of causation. On the one hand, the word cause, and related words, can be used to describe a very wide range of situations, consistent with the possibility that people’s representation of causation is based on a single notion of causation, a perspective often called causal monism. On the other hand, as discussed in this chapter, it has proven difficult to develop a unitary theory of causation capable of addressing the various phenomena associated with causation. The difficulty in developing such a theory points to the possibility that people represent causation in several different ways, a view commonly referred to as causal pluralism (Cartwright 2004, DeVreese 2006, Godfrey-Smith 2010, Longworth 2010, Psillos 2008, Reiss 2009, Lombrozo 2010, Hall 2004, Hitchcock 2003, Lakoff & Johnson 1999).