Maybe he means something along the lines of same cause, same effect is just a placeholder for as long as all the things which matter stay the same, you get the same effect. After all, some things, such as time since the man invented fire and position relative to Neptune and so on and so forth cannot possibly be the same for two different events. And this in turn sort of means things which matter -> same effect is a circular definition. Maybe he means to say that the law of causality is not the actually useful principle for making predictions, while there are indeed repeatable experiments and useful predictions to be made.