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 Target Frame (3)