Lavoisier's Slow Burn

Extract

Limitations of space dictate that we confine ourselves to Miss Stern's most salient comments. First, a preliminary point. Miss Stern says “Levin offers no argument” for why “e happened because of c” implicitly contains an explanatory description, while “c caused e” does not. But surely the remark ([1], 273) that we often know that c caused e without knowing why c caused e is just such an argument. Our linguistic intuition suggests that we use the first locution in this case; Miss Stern's evidently does not. Cases of non-diagnostic causal ascriptions do exist, and even ordinary language must provide for them; how it does so is a verbal dispute about English.