Abstract

Facts and events can cause things and be caused. Singular causal statements relate items of both kinds. Truth-value of a singular causal statement is preserved through substitutions which preserve reference to the same fact or event. Referential transparency of the causal context does not conflict with the necessary connection between an event and its cause because the necessity is de re. A particular fact does not have its actual cause essentially. Apparent failures of substitutivity are explained by appeal to logical features of fact-designating nominals, which are subject to scope ambiguities, and to conflation of changes in explanatory power with changes in truth-value. ;Law statements predicate another relation between properties of events, and support the appropriate subjunctive conditionals. They also provide a basis for accounts of preemption, parasitic constant conjunction, and accidental regularity, not accounted for by regularity, singularist, manipulability, and counterfactual analyses. ;There is a de re necessary connection between cause and effect. If event a caused event b, b is essentially such that it was caused by a. Secondly, there are properties f of a and g of b such that if anything were to have f it would be accompanied by something with g. This condition is to be understood in terms of f and g standing in a modal relation. If there is a special causal modality, it operates here, and not in the above claim about b