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illicitlearning comments on Causal Universes - LessWrong
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This is a rather confused use of some linguistic terminology. I think "a subject, a verb, and an object" is probably what was intended. (It's worth noting that in academic syntax these terms are somewhat deprecated and don't necessarily have useful meanings. I think the casual meanings are still clear enough in informal contexts like this though.)
Beyond the terminology issue, I'm unconvinced by the actual claim here. Arguments from linguistic usage often turn out to be very bad on scrutiny, and I'm not sure this one holds up too well. What about 'Quirrell secretly followed Harry.'? Seems like a much weaker assertion that Quirrell is causally affecting Harry in some way here. I expect there are more obvious examples - that one took me 10 seconds to come up with.
There are plenty of sentences that have a noun, a verb, and a subject without having an agent - anything in passive voice or any unaccusative will do the trick. I suspect the argument would be even better worded using semantic roles rather than syntactic categories, eg: "Causality exists when there is an event with an agent". This isn't a very interesting thing to say though, because "agent" is a casual semantic role and so relies on causality existing by definition. You literally cannot have an event with an agent unless there is causality.
Yes, agreed. Semantic roles make the claim much more valid (but also less interesting, it seems to me).