Causation: Many Words, One Thing?

Abstract

How many notions of cause are there? The causality literature is witnessing a flourishing of pluralist positions. Here I focus on a recent debate on whether interpreting causality in terms of inferential relations commits one to semantic pluralism (Reiss, 2011) or not (Williamson, 2006). I argue that inferentialism is compatible with a `weak' form of monism, where causality is envisaged as one, vague cluster concept. I offer two arguments for this, one for vagueness, one for uniqueness. Finally, I qualify in what sense the resulting form of monism is `weak'.