Abstract

It has been argued that intuition, perception and mechanistic rationales generate knowledge of singular causation unambiguously supporting the metaphysical view that causation is a local relationship between individual events. The analysis conducted in this paper contradicts this line of reasoning. Intuition, perception and mechanistic rationales rely, tacitly or explicitly, on prior contrasts between patterns describing populations of events. The fact that verdicts about singular causation are often reached in light of statistical, abductive or extrapolative inferences that are liable to error further entails that knowledge of singular causation is less certain than the knowledge of patterns and group-level difference-making dependencies from which it is derived. This indicates that claims about singular causation are not commonsense truisms, but complex epistemic constructs that should be approached more critically, especially if such claims are meant to guide action.