Conceptual Disunity and the Case of Causation

Abstract: There have been a number of attempts over the years to argue that there are two distinct concepts of cause – one roughly characterised by appeal to ideas such as production and generation, the other by notions such as relevance and mattering. David Lewis complained that “(i)f causation is, or might be, wildly disjunctive, we need to know what unifies the disjunction” (Lewis 2004, p.76). He was right. In this talk, I want to agree with those who have suggested that causation is, in a sense, “wildly disjunctive” – and to present the case for thinking so. But I also accept Lewis’s insistence that we need to know what unifies the disjunction. I shall suggest that there are difficulties with many natural suggestions as to what the source of unification might be – and that ultimately, we may need to exploit different models of concepts from those which are mainly prevalent in analytic philosophy, ones which put metaphor at the heart of conceptual structure.