Oliver,
I think I may have figured out the problem. You are talking about
causation as predictive and I'm talking about it as descriptive. Saying
"x will cause y" is more difficult and problematic than saying "x was
one of the immediate causes of y" (which is all that I would claim is
possible with certainty.)
The qualifiers--"one of" and immediate"--are, of course important. (I
think of them as important qualifiers. Someone looking for absolutist
declarations might call them weasel words.) I start a new semester of
graphic design history on Monday night and the first two things I do is
emphasize that anyone who says that there was one cause for anything
complex and big is lying and tell them that they should be suspicious
of the motives of anyone telling them anything and that includes me.
So I would challenge your assertion that the cause of anything changes
with the context of the interpreter; it is the parts of the causes
being emphasized that change.
Saying that the universe is causal in some sense in not the same as
saying it is mechanistic.
Gunnar
On Jan 6, 2005, at 11:41 PM, Hoffmann, Oliver - HOFOY001 wrote:
> But "other things"
> are never really "equal": One could imagine a frozen apple (would not
> cut so easily), an apple made of different material (now the softness
> of
> apple cells caused the cut), a different makeup for human muscle (now
> human muscle cell dynamics caused the cut)
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