Event Causation: The Counterfactual Analysis

Philosophical theories of causation can be split two ways, into four groups. First. there is the split between event and fact or state of affairs theories. Event theories give pride of place to causal statements like these: •The explosion caused the fire. •His sudden collapse was caused by the beating they gave him. Fact theories give primacy rather to statements like these: •The forest burned because an incendiary bomb was dropped into it. •They beat him and that led to his suddenly collapsing.1 The two are separated by the difference between perfect nominals such as ‘explosion’, ‘fight’, ‘divorce’, ‘quarrel’, ‘fire’, ‘collapse’, etc. on the one hand, and fully sentential clauses such as ‘They beat him’ and imperfect nominals like ‘his suddenly collapsing’ on the other.2 That split has to do with one’s selection of analysandum. The second split concerns choice of analysans: it is the split between subsumption and counterfactual analyses of causal statements. According to the subsumption analyses, ‘x caused y’ means roughly that x and y have properties that enable them to be subsumed under some causally true conditional—x under the antecedent, y under the consequent. Counterfactual analyses, on the other hand, say that ‘x caused y’ means something to the effect that if there hadn’t been x there wouldn’t have been y.