Abstract

The article considers the bearing of so-called "slingshot" arguments on the connective "because". It discusses Davidson's famous (1967) slingshot, deployed in support of the thesis that causation cannot be a relation between facts, and also a neater version developed by Stephen Neale in his (1995). The paper challenges the assumption (Anscombe (1969), Lycan (1974), Mellor (1995), Neale (1995)), that Davidson's argument, which actually concerns the connective "The fact that ... caused it to be the case that ..." (FC) might equally have been directed against "because", by pointing out important differences between the two connectives, differences which render "because" invulnerable to attacks which are, by contrast, damaging to some tempting interpretations of FC. It suggests that the true import of slingshot arguments directed at these causal-explanatory connectives is not so much to show that a fact-free ontology of causation is required as to reveal the fine-grained nature of the facts which causation relates.