A familiar, central, and tricky relation

At one time or another, most of us have had the experience of reaching for something too quickly. Let's say you go to grab a biscuit from across the dinner table and bump a glass with your elbow. Water from the glass spills. Not much could be more obvious, it seems, than that you bumped the glass and thereby caused the water to spill. To put this in a grand-sounding way, your bump of the glass stood in the relation of causation to the spill. That is what we are going to try to understand better in this chapter, that relation that holds between the bump and the spill in this mundane example. This is a terrific topic because causation is about as familiar, central, and tricky as metaphysical concepts come.

The spilled-water case should be enough to convince you that causation is a familiar concept. That it is a central concept is also straightforward: it is something we do whenever we affect what is around us. It is something we undergo whenever we are affected by what is around us. Molecular bonding, planetary rotation, human decisions, and life itself are all causal processes. Causation is part of scientific practice: at least typically, a scientific explanation of some event will include some mention of something that caused that event; you can't say why something happened without identifying what caused it to happen. Causation is part of philosophy too.