Abstract

There are various sources of the human conceptual system that pertain to causation. According to the realism of René Thom the attention network is attuned to existing patterns of singularities in space/time. According to cognitive linguistics the conceptual system is determined by the neural wiring and the embodied experience of the cognizer. Our concepts do therefore not necessarily reflect objective properties of space and time. In this paper I discuss the two positions and their relation. Following Len Talmy, I present a comparison between how causation is conceived in language and how it is conceived in science. Finally, the notion of agency and its relation to a basic causative sequence is discussed in more detail.