Singular causal explanations cite explicitly, or may be paraphrased to cite explicitly, a particular factor as the cause of another particular factor. During recent years there has emerged a consensus account of the nature of an important feature of such explanations, the distinction between a factor regarded correctly in a given context of inquiry as 'the cause' of a given result and those other causally relevant factors, sometimes called 'mere conditions', which are not regarded correctly in that context of inquiry as the cause of that result. In this paper that consensus account is characterized and developed. The developed version is then used to illuminate some recent discussions of singular causal explanations.
Causal explanation has always occupied an important place among the professional concerns of philosophers. And since Hume, most of this interest has been in sorts of causal explanation that are of special importance to our understanding of the developed sciences. It is only very recently that philosophers have shown more than a passing interest in the peculiarities of those sorts of causal explanation that are more characteristic of historical, legal and 'common sense' contexts of inquiry. Among the most important of these are singular causal explanations, explanations which cite explicitly, or may be paraphrased to cite explicitly, a particular factor as the cause of another particular factor.
An important and puzzling aspect of singular causal explanations is the distinction between a factor regarded correctly in a given context of inquiry as the cause of a given result and those other causally relevant factors, sometimes called 'mere conditions', which are not regarded correctly in that context of inquiry as the cause of that result. For example, typically, a short circuit might, whereas the normal presence of oxygen would not, be regarded correctly as the cause of a house catching fire, even though the presence of both factors may have been necessary for the occurrence of that fire. During recent years many philosophers have tried to state the rules in accordance with which we distinguish between the cause and mere conditions. There has now been enough overlap among these published proposals to warrant characterization of a 'consensus account'A In what follows we shall examine this account, expose some of