According to the Laplacean picture, it is as if God created our universe by specifying the initial conditions and the laws of nature. Then, given the Supreme Being's specifications, the entire history of the cosmos, every fact, was completely determined. Within this picture, causal facts receive no special treatment. Once the laws and the initial conditions are set, then so are such truths as that my striking the match caused it to ignite. Because it depicts the causal facts as fixed in this way, we can think of the Laplacean picture as at least suggesting that lawhood (when taken together with certain particular facts) has important causal entailments. Ignoring other parts of the picture (like its portrayal of our world as deterministic), we should wonder if the particular suggestion about the relationship between lawhood and causation is accurate. Does being a law of nature guarantee the presence of any causal truths? What about closely related nomic concepts? Does chance or the counterfactual conditional have causal repercussions?

Let us draw a distinction that parallels Chapter 1's distinction between the nomic concepts and the nonnomic concepts. Let the causal concepts be the ones that have both extremely direct and very obvious connections with causation. Here I primarily have in mind causation itself and its very close nomic cousins like production, bringing about, and (causal) explanation.