Causal Statements and Statements of Necessary and/or Sufficient Conditions | Causal Inquiry in International Relations | Oxford Academic
Over the years, it has been suggested that causal statements are equivalent to, or can be translated into, statements of sufficient conditions, of necessary conditions, or of necessary and sufficient conditions (Sosa 1975b: 1–2; see also Sosa 1975a). In addition, Mackie has advanced an influential argument to the effect that a causal statement will often describe neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition, but rather an ‘INUS condition’: it will identify a putative cause as ‘an insufficient but necessary part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the result’ (1965: 245; cf. 1980: 62). For reasons we will shortly examine, attempts to analyse causal statements by reference to statements of necessary and/or sufficient conditions have fallen out of fashion among philosophers. In the social sciences, however, links are commonly drawn between statements of these two kinds (see, for example, Collier, Brady, and Seawright 2010: 145–52; Gerring 2012: 335–42). In part