Hi dmb, > Steve said: > Does smoking cause lung cancer? Does SOM cause philosophical Platypi? Are > dirty plugs in the motorcycle the cause of the richness? Did Platt cause a > lot of misunderstanding of the MOQ over the years? (Perhaps we ought to only > say that misunderstanding valued Platt?)
> dmb says: > You're conflating "cause" as the responsible agent with "cause" as mechanical > law again. Your misuse of the term is far from a single, isolated event or a > slip of the tongue. It's a conceptual error that is almost certainly going to > result in confusion. Steve: I'm sorry, but it is you who is in error here. You are trying to enforce a distinction that does not exist in the MOQ, There are nothing but responsible agents in the MOQ picture, and there are no such things as mechanistic prescriptive laws in the MOQ. "Cause" is an inference about preferences in the MOQ whether we are talking about billiard balls and rocks or human beings. To the extent that we can still talk about "causal laws," we regard laws as pragmatic descriptions rather than prescriptions with fundamental ontological status. Rocks and trees don't do what they do because they are obeying laws, they do what they do because they want to just as we humans do what we do because we want to. Best, Steve. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
