Ah, okay, thanks for the clarification. I did in fact interpret you as proposing an agency theory of causality; I think the following helped to mislead me in that direction:
I'm not sure it makes sense to say things like "The fine structure constant caused complex life." Causality may be a rather parochial concept in the scheme of things and therefore we get rather confused about it when trying to extend it's application away from the domain of potential human intervention
I think I actually wanted to refer to the preface of Pearl's book, in particular this part:
In the last decade, owing partly to advances in graphical models, causality has undergone a major transformation: from a concept shrouded in mystery into a mathematical object with well-defined semantics and well-founded logic...Put simply, causality has been mathematized.
My implication would have been that causality is not a merely human folk-concept that makes sense only in the context of "agents"; but if you weren't saying otherwise, this is of course moot.
So I should clarify a bit more. We can understand causality as the following: A causes B iff an intervention on A alters the value of B. The concept of 'intervention' is doing the work here. Agency theories reduce 'intervention' to possible actions of free agents. I prefer Pearl's approach which fails to reduce the concept of intervention to non-causal concepts but a) doesn't obviously fail to actually describe our concept of cause the way the agency approach does and b) is a lot more illuminating. However, that doesn't mean our concept of intervention doe...
What's the worst argument you can think of?
One of my favorites is from a Theodore Sturgeon science fiction story in which it's claimed that faster than light communication must be possible because even though stars are light years apart, a person can look from one to another in a moment.
I don't know about you, but bad logic makes my stomach hurt, especially on first exposure.
This seems rather odd-- what sort of physical connection might that be?
Also, I'm not sure how common the experience is, though a philosophy professor did confirm it for himself and (by observation) his classes. He mentioned one of the Socratic dialogues (sorry, I can't remember which one) which is a compendium of bad arguments and which seemed to have that effect on his classes.
So, how did you feel when you read that bit of sf hand-waving? If your stomach hurt, what sort of stomach pain was it? Like nausea? Like being hit? Something else? If you had some other sensory reaction, can you describe it?
For me, the sensation is some sort of internal twinge which isn't like nausea.
Anyway, both for examination and for the fun of it, please supply more bad arguments.
I think there are sensory correlates for what is perceived to be good logic (unfortunately, they don't tell you whether an argument is really sound)-- kinesthesia which has to do with solidity, certainty, and at least in my case, a feeling that all the corners are pinned down.
Addendum: It looks as though I was generalizing from one example. If you have a fast reaction to bad arguments and it isn't kinesthetic, what is it?