Causation as Folk Science

Abstract Each of the individual sciences seeks to comprehend the processes of the natural world in some narrow domain—chemistry, the chemical processes, biology; Jiving processes, and so on. It is widely he]d, however, that all the sciences are unified at a deeper level in that natural processes are governed, at least in significant measure, by cause and effect. Their presence is routinely asserted in a law of causation or principle of causality—roughly that every effect is produced through lawfol necessity by a cause—and our accounts of the natural world are expected to conform to it.1