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Full Idea
Facts are not the sort of item that can cause anything. A fact is a true proposition (they say); it is not something in the world but is rather something about the world.
Gist of Idea
Facts are about the world, not in it, so they can't cause anything
Source
Jonathan Bennett (Events and Their Names [1988], p.22), quoted by Jonathan Schaffer - The Metaphysics of Causation 1.1
Book Ref
'Stanford Online Encyclopaedia of Philosophy', ed/tr. Stanford University [plato.stanford.edu], p.4
A Reaction
Compare 10361. Good argument, but maybe 'fact' is ambiguous. See Idea 10365. Events are said to be more concrete, and so can do the job, but their individuation also seems to depend on a description (as Davidson has pointed out).
Related Ideas
Idea 10365 We might use 'facta' to refer to the truth-makers for facts [Mellor, by Schaffer,J]
Idea 10361 Events are fairly course-grained (just saying 'hello'), unlike facts (like saying 'hello' loudly) [Schaffer,J]
| 8435 | Causes are between events ('the explosion') or between facts/states of affairs ('a bomb dropped') [Bennett] |
| 8437 | The full counterfactual story asserts a series of events, because counterfactuals are not transitive [Bennett] |
| 8436 | Either cause and effect are subsumed under a conditional because of properties, or it is counterfactual [Bennett] |
| 8438 | A counterfactual about an event implies something about the event's essence [Bennett] |
| 8439 | Maybe each event has only one possible causal history [Bennett] |
| 8440 | Maybe an event's time of occurrence is essential to it [Bennett] |
| 8441 | Delaying a fire doesn't cause it, but hastening it might [Bennett] |
| 8978 | Events are made of other things, and are not fundamental to ontology [Bennett] |
| 10364 | Facts are about the world, not in it, so they can't cause anything [Bennett] |
| 8592 | Empty space is measurable in ways in which empty time necessarily is not [Bennett, by Shoemaker] |