Ordinary causal talk

I argue for the paradoxical claim that much of our ordinary causal talk does not semantically express causation. In particular, sentences like ‘Suzy caused the bottle to break’ or ‘Suzy broke the bottle’ do not say or even entail that something Suzy did was a cause of the breaking of the bottle. I do not deny that we tend to use these sentences when we believe that Suzy’s action was a cause of the breaking, or that we tend to form such a belief when we hear others use these sentences. My claim is that these tendencies are not justified by the meanings of cause and break alone. I maintain that the argument generalizes widely, casting doubt on the easy expressibility of causation in English, and perhaps in other natural languages as well.

Zoom-link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85250575838?pwd=M21okObuBY0UjWZgED4b18ms2O4JXr.1