Causation and Causation in Fiction

In this chapter, I explore the nature of causationcausation in light of several philosophical theories: Hume’s regularity theory, Necessitarianism, counterfactual accounts, the transfer of energy account, and a few others. I point out that the exact nature of causation is difficult or impossible to pin down, particularly in a short chapter, but note that we can glean some desiderata for an adequate theory of causation from this discussion. Next, I turn to the nature of causation in fiction, and argue that the preceding discussion sheds some helpful light on what to look for or aim at in causation in fiction.