I am not aware of a conventional way in which philosophers standardly draw this distinction. However, if a particular author distinguishes between "causing" and "bringing about", she might have in mind any one of several possible distinctions. Here are three candidates: (i) causing versus being part of the causal background: The alarm clock's ringing causes me to awaken. That I am not deaf, that I was asleep to begin with, that there was air to conduct the sound from the alarm bell to my ear, etc., were all needed for me to awaken; without them, I would not have awakened when the alarm clock rang. So they, too, are causes -- at least, broadly speaking. But we might well want to privilege the alarm clock's ringing from among all of the other, background causes, and say that it was the alarm clock's ringing that brought about my awakening. (ii) causing versus preventing a potential preventer. Dick, pilot of a bomber, bombs a city. His actions cause the city to be bombed. Jane, pilot of a...

Determinism is the view that the state of the world at any moment, plus the laws of nature, determine (i.e., logically entail) the state of the world at any other moment. Quantum mechanics and chaos theory relate to determinism in rather different ways. Chaos theory concerns systems whose development is exquisitely sensitive to their current state -- in that a very small change to their current state would produce enormous changes to their later state. A chaotic system is not incompatible with determinism as I have defined it above. But the existence of chaotic systems entails that any small uncertainty in our knowledge of that system's initial conditions (and some such uncertainty is always present, for grubby practical reasons) will quickly ramify into great uncertainty in our predictions regarding that system, even if we know all of the relevant laws of nature. None of this threatens determinism as a view about prediction "in principle." But quantum mechanics does that. The complete state...