ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two related theses: correct definition, and causal relation. The definition of cause gives occasion concerns the immediate spatial and temporal contiguity of cause and effect. It is one thing to know what cause means in the cheap sense of being able to understand intuitively such an assertion as that the Santa Barbara earthquake caused the collapse of numberless chimneys. The alleged impossibility of such immediate contiguity is the chief ground upon which Russell has advocated the extrusion of the term 'cause' from the philosophical vocabulary. The immediate contiguity of cause and effect in space and time, having no space-time dimension at all. As Russell himself notes, people cannot without 'intolerable circumlocution', Scientific Method in Philosophy, avoid speaking of one particular event as causing another particular event. The chapter summarizes by saying that the expression 'the cause of the breaking of this window' has two senses: strict, and elliptical.
