Perspectives on causation: selected papers from the Jerusalem 2017 workshop

This book explores relationships and maps out intersections between discussions on causation in three scientific disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. The book is organized in five thematic parts, investigating connections between philosophical and linguistic studies of causation; presenting novel methodologies for studying the representation of causation; tackling central issues in syntactic and semantic representation of causal relations; and introducing recent advances in philosophical thinking on causation. Beyond its thematic organization, readers will find several recurring topics throughout this book, such as the attempt to reduce causality to other non-causal terms; causal pluralism vs. one all-encompassing account for causation; causal relations pertaining to the mental as opposed to the physical realm, and more. This collection also lays the foundation for questioning whether it is possible to evaluate available philosophical approaches to causation against the variety of linguistic phenomena ranging across diverse lexical and grammatical items, such as bound morphemes, prepositions, connectives, and verbs. Above all, it lays the groundwork for considering whether the fruits of the psychological-cognitive study of the perception of causal relations may contribute to linguistic and philosophical studies, and whether insights from linguistics can benefit the other two disciplines.

Part 1: Perspectives on causations -- Chapter 1. Causation: from metaphysics to semantics and back (Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, Nora Boneh) -- Chapter 2. Communicating clausal structure (Christopher Hitchcock) -- Part II: Methodology: Uncovering the representation of causation -- Chapter 3. Exploring the representation of causality across languages: integrating production, comprehension and conceptualization perspectives (Jürgen Bohnemeyer et. al) -- Chapter 4. Asking questions to provide a causal explanation -- Do people search for the information required by cognitive psychological theories? (York Hagmayer & Neele Engelmann) -- Part III: Meaning components of Causation -- Chapter 5. Event causation and force dynamics in argument structure constructions (William Croft & Meagan Vigus) -- Chapter 6. Resultatives and Constraints on Concealed Causatives (Beth Levin) -- Chapter 7. Deconstructing Internal Causation (Malka Rappaport Hovav) -- Chapter 8. Aspectual differences between agentive and non-agentive uses of causative predicates(Fabienne Martin) -- Part IV: Syntactic and semantic aspects of causation -- Chapter 9. Experiencers and causation (Artemis Alexiadou & Elena Anagnostopoul…