Although philosophers have often held that causation is a purely descriptive notion, a growing body of experimental work on ordinary causal attributions using questionnaire methods indicates that it is heavily influenced by normative information. These results have been the subject of sceptical challenges. Additionally, those who find the results compelling have disagreed about how best to explain them. In this chapter, we help resolve these debates by using a new set of tools to investigate ordinary causal attributions-the methods of corpus linguistics. We apply both more qualitative corpus analysis techniques and the more purely quantitative methods of distributional semantics to four target questions: (a) Can corpus analysis provide independent support for the thesis that ordinary causal attributions are sensitive to normative information? (b) Does the evidence coming from corpus analysis support the contention that outcome valence matters for ordinary causal attributions? (c) Are ordinary causal attributions similar to responsibility attributions? (d) Are causal attributions of philosophers different from causal attributions we find in corpora of more ordinary language? We argue that the results of our analyses support a positive answer to each of these questions. causal statement, in contrast, describes the relation between two event tokens, such as 'Peter's smoking caused his lung cancer' or 'Jenny's throwing the rock caused the window to break'. For both general and actual causation, most philosophers assume that the concept of causation is a purely descriptive notion, refering to a relation in the world. As a consequence, a causal attribution such as 'A caused B' is true if and only if the relation of causation holds between A and B. Such an understanding of causation, however, means that normative considerations are irrelevant to causal attributions. The basic idea here is that whether or not an action is permitted by morality or convention simply does not matter for purposes of assessing whether that action, or the entity carrying it out, caused the outcome. Similarly, whether an action causes a morally good or bad outcome is irrelevant for causal considerations. Call this the standard view on causation. Against the standard view, a growing body of empirical findings indicates that ordinary causal attributions are sensitive to normative information, prominently including injunctive norms

This chapter outlines the range of argument forms involving causation that can be found in everyday discourse. It also surveys empirical work concerned with the generation and evaluation of such arguments. This survey makes clear that there is presently no unified body of research concerned with causal argument. It highlights the benefits of a unified treatment both for those interested in causal cognition and those interested in argumentation, and identifies the key challenges that must be met for a full understanding of causal argumentation.

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