The title of this part is taken from Maria Carla Galavotti. Galavotti, like me, argues that causation is a highly varied thing. There are, I maintain, a variety of different kinds of relations that we might be pointing to with the label ‘cause’ and each different kind of relation needs to be matched with the right methods for finding out about it as well as with the right inference rules for how to use our knowledge of it.

Chapter 2, ‘Causation: one word, many things’, defends my pluralist view of causality and suggests that the different accounts of causality that philosophers and economists offer point to different features that a system of particular causal relations might have, where the relations themselves are more precisely described with thick causal terms – like ‘pushes’, ‘wrinkles’, ‘smothers’, ‘cheers up’ or ‘attracts’ – than with the loose, multi-faceted concept causes. It concludes with the proposal that labelling a specific set of relations ‘causal’ in science can serve to classify them under one or another well-known ‘causal’ scheme, like the Bayes-nets scheme or the ‘structural’ equations of econometrics, thus warranting all the conclusions about that set of relations appropriate to that scheme.

Whereas ch. 2 endorses an ontological pluralism, ch. 3, ‘Causal claims: warranting them and using them’, is epistemological. It describes the plurality of methods that can provide warrant for a causal conclusion.