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Re: Cause and Effect



At 11:15 26 10 2000 , you wrote:
Cause is that/those whose existence is essential PRIOR to the
production of effect.

I have stayed out of this tedious semantic thread because I suspected that
it would wend this way.

From my point of view there is absolutely no (zero) benefit from insisting
on one's own definition of any word. _Words_ by themselves have no
meaning. _People_ show meaning via words. In order to communicate
communicants should agree on approximate word meaning and refine their
common usage during the conversation.

In a classroom get the class to agree on a useful meaning for words like
"cause" and stick with it throughout the discussion.

If one wants to insist that the word "cause" necessarily implies a
measurable time lapse between action and result, OK, but I don't thing
this is very useful in the present thread.

One useful mechanism in this situation is to ask that the communicant
express him/herself with a different word. If s/he can't do that, s/he
almost always doesn't understand what s/he is talking about.

But for heaven's sake stop bickering about the semantics of the words.

Is it not clear that if there is acceleration, there must be an associated
net force? And if there is a net force, there must be an
acceleration? But to say to a class that the acceleration "caused" the
force is not very helpful to anyone. Let's be reasonable here.

I am quite comfortable saying that the force "caused" the
acceleration. And anyone but a pedant will understand me. If you are not
comfortable with that usage, don't say it. But don't bug me about it.


Jim Green
mailto:JMGreen@sisna.com
http://users.sisna.com/jmgreen