Causal Reasoning

Roles: cause, effect, agent, mechanism, consequence, chain, condition

The everyday cognitive activity of understanding why things happen — identifying causes, predicting effects, assigning responsibility, and constructing explanations. As a target domain, causal reasoning is deeply shaped by embodied metaphors of force, contact, and motion. It spans informal attribution (“what made this happen?”) through scientific and legal standards of evidence, but the metaphorical structure is most visible in ordinary language where causes push, pull, produce, and block.

As Source Frame (1)

• Logical Relations Are Causal Relations → intellectual-inquiry

Applied To This Frame (20)

• fluid-dynamics → A Problem Is a Body of Water
• containers → A Problem Is a Locked Container for Its Solution
• journeys → A Problem Is a Region in a Landscape
• dynamical-systems → Butterfly Effect
• time-and-temporality → Causal Precedence Is Temporal Precedence
• economics → Causation Is Commercial Transaction
• governance → Causation Is Control Over An Entity Relative To A Location
• economics → Causation Is Control Over An Object Relative To A Possessor
• governance → Causation Is Control Over Relative Location
• containers → Causes And Effects Are Linked Objects
• embodied-experience → Causes Are Forces
• governance → False in One Thing, False in All
• fluid-dynamics → Force Is a Substance Contained in Affecting Causes
• horticulture → Fruit of the Poisonous Tree
• architecture-and-building → Problem Is a Constructed Object
• embodied-experience → Problem Is a Tangle
• target-practice → Problem Is A Target
• governance → The Exception Proves the Rule
• communication → The Thing Speaks for Itself
• science-fiction → Time Travel Is Historical Counterfactual