Abstract: This chapter argues that the idea of causation has similar status to ideas of cohesion, forces, and things. Appreciating the role of causation in a notional world is crucial to understanding the nature of the special sciences, and the general ways in which they differ from fundamental physics. Causation, unlike cohesion, is both a notional-world concept and a folk concept. Moreover, causation, unlike cohesion, is a basic category of traditional metaphysics, including metaphysics that purports to be naturalistic but falls short of this ambition. This chapter also argues that causation, just like cohesion, is a representational real pattern that is necessary for an adequately comprehensive science. It begins with an account that eliminates causation altogether on naturalistic grounds, and then shows, using principle of naturalistic closure (PNC)-mandated motivations, why this outright eliminativism is too strong. The eliminativist argument to be discussed is due to Bertrand Russell, whose view has some important contemporary adherents among philosophers of physics.

Keywords: causation, cohesion, real patterns, Bertrand Russell, principle of naturalistic closure, eliminativism, special sciences, fundamental physics, natural kinds,