This paper offers a linguistic analysis of some major works representative of three widely acknowledged IR epistemologies, namely neopositivism, critical realism and poststructuralism, showing the heuristic function of causation as a tool to make sense of the world they try to explain. The paper invites reflecting on the importance of language for the provision of causal explanations, and stresses the need to adopt a critical stand to causation that focuses in its utility for explanatory purposes, which involves a thorough assessment of the language employed for outlining causal relationships, and taking consciousness about the power relationships that derive from the linguistic articulation of causation in each of the works and epistemologies addressed.
