John Denker gave a nice overview of how he sees various positions on
causation and I feel compelled to throw in my two cents (actually more like
484 cents worth).
1) This discussion *is* related to the perennial inertial vs. non-inertial
frames discussion and the "reality" of inertial forces (known as fictitious
forces to some). While I usually say F causes a in my discussions of
Newton's laws, I realized that in this perennial discussion my views are
actually more closely alligned to what John says regarding causation. One
should probably make sure one's views are "foolishly" consistant on these
two topics.
2) If by "causation", one is thinking in terms of cause and effect and are
identifying an event as a cause of some other event (the effect). There is
a necessary temporal ordering, one of those events must lie on or to the
interior light cone of the other. And I think you are forced to agree with
John's position.
3) OTOH, in introductory classes I first cover the topic of kinematics. We
identify acceleration as important. It seems to be a very natural question
to ask "what causes the acceleration of an object"? And the natural
response seems to be (in the context of Newtonian Mechanics) to say
"Forces". I can't help but think that the idea of "causation" is different
in (2) and (3), (3) being a more fuzzy heuristic way of dealing with the
ideas of force and acceleration and cause and effect.
I'm struggling here, and I'm guessing the above comments put me in Denker's
"Part II - stretched version" camp.