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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3772684" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here are some sentences of Enlgish, all completely banal, having the form "B because A":*I caught malaria because I was bitten by a mosquito.*I was late for work because I missed my train.*The match lit because it was struck on the box.None of them is equivlant to "If A, then B". Therefore, none of them entails "If not B, then not A". In particular, none of the following follows from the above:*If I don't have malaria I was not bitten by a mosquito (perhaps I was, but it was not carrying the parasite).*If I'm not late for work I didn't miss my train (perhaps I did, but caught a taxi so as to be on time).*If the match did not light it was not struck on the box (perhaps it was, but the box was damp).I don't know how much clearer I can make it. It has nothing to do with biconditionals. (That is, the claim "I have malaria if and only if I am bitten by a mosquito" is obviously false - I personally have been bitten by many mosquitos and have never contracted malaria). It has to do with the fact that "because", a conjunction of causation or explanation in English, is not used to signal only sufficient conditions, but sometimes also necessary conditions, or INUS conditions.Thus, "It will be the best yet because we love it" does not imply "If it's not the best we didn't love it", nor "If theirs was not the best they didn't love it". What the sentence is calling out by its use of "because" is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition.And btw, John Mackie was a fellow at Oxford and is widely regarded as one of the great English-speaking metaphysicians and philosophers of science of the second half of the twentieth century. Next you'll be saying that Nelson Goodman didn't know anything about the analysis of causation either!</blockquote>

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