Commonsense causation is ubiquitous. The everyday world is teeming with ordinary objects that have effects in virtue of having certain properties: the car's backfiring caused the horse to bolt; the door's blowing open caused the alarm to go off; the cook's adding peanuts to the sauce caused the guest's allergic reaction – these are all examples of commonsense causation.

There are countless causal verbs and phrases in ordinary language – “attract,” “excite,” “tear apart,” “open,” “remove”, “enlarge”, and so on – verbs whose use entails causal transactions. G. E. M. Anscombe presented a small sample of causal concepts: “scrape, push, wet, carry, eat, burn, knock over, keep off, squash, make (e.g., noises, paper boats), hurt.” Each of these verbs expresses a kind of commonsense causation. The root idea of commonsense causation is making something happen. To cause is to bring about, to produce, to give rise to something.

Commonsense causation is nonHumean in several ways. First, our experience is not just of successive events, but of causation: we see the knife slice the bread, and we hear the glass shatter, where slicing and shattering are themselves causal phenomena. Second, singular causal transactions (such as that x's having F has an effect) are local: they do not depend on regularities that extend throughout space and time, but rather only on the instantiation of the properties by ordinary objects in certain circumstances.