Ibn al-Hajib raises the objection that the absence of a cause does not invariably entail the absence of its effect, since an effect can have more than one cause. Why then is the consequent often understood not to have occurred in sentences with law?
The objection matters because one must not confuse a particle’s linguistic meaning with unrestricted logical entailment. Excluding one route to an outcome does not automatically exclude every other route.
The responses distinguish ordinary speech in which the link is contextually understood, cases involving inference from the result, and cases that rely on the particular lexical convention of law.