CAUSATION

This suggests the second option: causes and effects are not objects but events (i.e., happenings or changes in objects). Donald Davidson is the modern philosopher most closely associated with this view.1 According to this view, any singular causal claim, if it does not explicitly connect events, can always be rewritten so that it does connect events, thereby revealing the true logical structure of the causal claim. Thus ‘the car killed the man’ should be rewritten as:

making it explicit that the relata are events. On the remaining option, facts are the causal relata. Whereas events are

typically picked out by definite descriptions (‘the death of the man’), facts tend to be denoted by complete sentences (‘the man died’). According to this option, defended recently by Hugh Mellor, any causal sentence not explicitly connecting events, can and should be rewritten in terms of facts.2 Thus, ‘the car killed the man’ should be recast as:

making it explicit that the relata are facts. If we put the first view to one side, which of the remaining views is correct?