ABSTRACT
In treating cause as like a conditional (or implicational type) there is a familiar problem of getting in a satisfactory way from natural language locutions, for example of the form “a causes ß ”, to conditional forms which typically couple sentences. A variety of expressions plug into the causal form, not just event subjects but gerundives such as “smoking”—but not significantly sentences. One difficulty in working with “a causes ß" as primitive is that not all the usual sentential connectives are particularly well-defined on the relevant substituents; for example, negation becomes problematic with event clauses, though not unintelligible as with proper names.
