Elusive Causation

Abstract

David Lewis claimed that knowledge is elusive. "That is how knowledge is elusive. Examine it, and straightway it vanishes..." He argued that epistemology robs us of our knowledge: "Maybe epistemology is the culprit. Maybe the extraordinary pastime robs us of our knowledge. Maybe we do know a lot in daily life; but maybe when we look hard at our knowledge it goes away." The aim of this paper is to answer the question: might causation be elusive in a similar sense to that in which knowledge has been claimed to be elusive? Might there be pastimes that rob us of causation too? I will argue for a contextual account of causation and present detailed mechanisms for fixing truth values from the context.