><< effects do have causes, mate.
> This ain't a philosophical statement, it's a semantic necessity, no? >>
>
>That's one way of arguing that there are nonempirical truths. --jks
Not much of an argument though. Whilst I insist we're talking about a tautology here ('effect' is, after all, defined as that which happens as a result of something else), that doesn't mean I'm arguing that there are such things. Just that there's a word which means such things. Just for the record, I don't think conscious humans are 'caused' to do things (red lights don't cause us to stop, because red lights are demonstrably neither necessary nor sufficient to make us stop - they're just a good reason to stop), so human practice is not made up of effects, for mine.
But I do reckon proximate magnetic fluctuations 'cause' the 'effect' of animated iron filings.
Incidentally, I reckon this distinction is not unrelated to those drawn-out debates between the 'histomats' and the 'diamats' as to the basis of Marx's materialist conception of history. The above opinion places me in the former category, I reckon, coz it implies, nay, dictates, that flux in raw nature (eg anything that happened in the world before consciousness popped in - sorry 'bout the technical jargon) has to be distinguished between flux in the human-mediated world.
Hope this mischievous departure from the topic of Kantian postulates proves me wrong by causing the effect of animating an LBOer or two ...
Cheers, Rob.