Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

just stating that something does not exist — such as unicorns — means that it has some kind of existence in our minds, if not in reality. Anselm, for instance, used this as the basis for his proof of the existence of God. (The ontological argument. See Chapter 13.) This might be construed as another example of ‘polarism’ — if it’s not something then it must be something else. (See Metaphysics by Richard Taylor.) Note that an ‘absolute contingency’ is not an impossibility! An impossibility is really an absolute necessary truth that something is false — or, we might say, a necessary falsehood.

Closely related to contingent truth is what is referred to as a ‘counterfactual’. Counterfactuals occupy a kind of strange hinterland in terms of the kinds of truth we’ve been discussing above. A counterfactual is inviting us to ‘think outside the box’. For instance, it could be asked, ‘what would the world be like if…?’

All of this might seem like very abstract speculation. But if you stop to think about it, we all of us use counterfactuals a great deal in everyday speech. The most famous, of course, is: ‘If I’d known you were coming then I’d have baked a cake.’ (In my case, sorry readers, this is not true.)

Philosophy sometimes refers to rational truth as ‘analytic’ truth and to empirical truth as ‘synthetic’ truth. Since mathematics and logic are not derived from observation they are sometimes known as ‘formal’ truths, as discussed earlier.

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