Abstract
Since Elizabeth Anscombe’s inaugural lecture at Cambridge University, it has been well known among philosophers that natural languages provide multiple ways to express causal relationships other than ‘cause’ and its closest cognates such as ‘causes’, ‘causing’ etc. Anscombe’s 'small selection’ of so-called ‘causatives’ (words that express causal relationships) was: "scrape, push, wet, carry, eat, bum, knock over, keep off, squash, make (e.g. noises, paper boats), hurt". Though well known, the consequences of this circumstance are still underappreciated. The goal of this paper is to discuss a number of philosophically significant consequences of the grammar of causatives. Among other things, there is no fully generic causative, one that expresses nothing but ’the’ abstract causal relationship. Even ‘cause’ itself has a number of more specific implications not shared by other causatives. ‘Make’ is sometimes described as the prototypical causative (and not ‘cause’!), but even ‘make’ has connotations that aren’t shared by other causatives. Natural languages allow of different mechanisms to construct causative phrases. Anscombe’s list contains ‘lexical’ causatives where the idea of causation is built into the semantics of the verb itself. ‘Morphological’ causatives turn a verb into one that expresses causing by adding a prefix or suffix or other kind of change to the word stem. They exist in English only as remnants of Germanic construction in word pairs such as lie/lay, sit/seat, fall/fell. ‘Analytical' causatives add a verb clause to the main verb: the child burped vs the father made the child burp. Which verb clause is used has important consequences for the meaning of the whole phrase, cf. she forced him to take the poison vs she let him take the poison. The main body of the paper discusses the consequences of these facts for philosophical ideas about causation.
Speakers
Julian Reiss (JKU Linz)
Please note
The seminar will take place from 10 to 12 s.t. (please note the start at 10:00) in the MCMP’s larger seminar room (Ludwigstr. 31 / 021).