Perspectives on Causation (eBook)

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.

Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (PhD 2009, Harvard University), Associate Professor, joined the faculty of the department of Hebrew Language at Hebrew University in 2010 after being the lecturer in Semitics at Yale University. His areas of research: Formal semantics, typology, the history of the Semitic Languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Akkadian), and historical linguistics. He also studies the history of the linguistic discipline using methodologies from the field of philosophy of sciences. In recent years he mostly works on reciprocal constructions, causative constructions and constructions with non-argument datives, both from the semantic and the historical point of views. Elitzur was a visiting professor at Harvard University, Yale university and École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He currently serves as the director of the Language, Logic and Cognition Center at Hebrew University.

Nora Boneh (PhD 2003, Université Paris 8, Saint Denis) joined the Linguistics Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2007, after being a research and teaching associate at the universities of Paris 7, Denis Diderot and Paris 8, Saint Denis. Her research topics include the study of the linguistic manifestation of conceptual categories such as temporality, possession, and causation; within this exploration, particular attention is given to complex verb constructions, mainly from a syntactic synchronic perspective, but also from a historical one. She has mostly worked on the expression of habituality, on the aspectual properties of the Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew verbal systems, and their stability over time, on argument realization and the syntax of ditransitive verbs and datival arguments, and on causative constructions. Her linguistic analyses are carried out in semi-typological perspective applied to languages such as Hebrew, dialectal Arabic, French, English and Russian.