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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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While causation is an idea of general consequence
in religion and philosophy, it is a term of more special-
ized meaning in science, in history, and in law. In
science, causation is largely a principle of explanation
and prediction. For history, when admitted at all, it
is a vast abstraction that succeeds only minimally in
ordering the complexities of observed human behavior.
In law, the idea is at once highly theoretical as the
most general justification for the imposition of liability,
and severely practical as a means for assigning legal
responsibility in the individual case. Law views causa-
tion as related both to the order of nature and to the
nature of justice. In the first, causation plays a central
role in the determination of legal facts; in the second,
causation emerges as a leading component of the idea


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of responsibility. Each of these roles is indefinitely
complex. Their combination is the history of the idea
of causation in law.