Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

must be true — where this must is understood to express logical necessity. A statement is necessarily true if and only if the denial of the statement would produce a self-contradiction.

A contingent statement is one that may be true and may be false — that is, need not be false and need not be true. A contingent statement could be denied without self-contradiction.

A possible thing is either necessary or contingent.

These two terms — necessary and contingent — may at first seem straight-forward and unambiguous. But there are complications (as you may have expected). Both necessary and contingent truths are divided into ‘absolute’ and ‘natural’. For instance, for a bachelor to be unmarried is a necessary truth of the absolute kind — it’s logically impossible for this to be false. But, you’ll no doubt notice, this is just trivially true — in this case it’s true only because of the meaning of the word ‘bachelor’. Are there any absolute necessary truths that are not trivial? Well, firstly, it’s worth noting that this quest is really the goal of philosophy and science — truths that cannot be other than they are. As such, or so it is claimed, the axioms of mathematics are either necessarily true or false — they cannot be only contingently true. The laws of physics might be contenders for absolute necessary truths. To paraphrase Star Trek’s Scotty; ‘Ye canny change the laws of physics, captain!’ But it’s argued that the laws of physics could, at least in theory, be other than what they are. Thus they are ‘natural’ (in the sense of, ‘what usually seems to happen’). Also, it’s

53