I was stumbling through a physics paper on superluminal signalling, understanding roughly every tenth word (usually a quantifier or connective) when I found a bit I could understand.

Obviously, this argument could be used to criticize faster-than-c propagation only if, in any given reference frame, the only criterion for saying that an event is the cause of another one were the time ordering in that frame. However, cause and effect are usually not defined in this way. In fact, there are no precise definitions of these concepts, but only some intuitive ideas that allow us to recognize, in some cases, the existence of a causal relationship between events.

I won’t quote more, but it does move into “I don’t have a theory of causation, but I know it when I see it” territory. I’m not exactly a decorated veteran of the causation analysis wars, but I’ve spent enough time in them to be very sympathetic to physicists taking that line.

I reserve my right to change my mind when I come up with an analysis of causation though.