Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

don’t exist and that there never were any human-unicorn encounters! Therefore, the conclusion doesn’t follow. But we have achieved a result of sorts by framing our idea in terms that can be systematically analysed. And that’s the point. As we’ve seen earlier, a lot of speculation about the world takes this same form — if such-and-such were true then perhaps this-and-this would follow. So the systematic ordering of statements — in the manner described above — can be a real help in unravelling what is known and what can be deduced from it.

As we’ve seen, science deals mainly in synthetic truth. It attempts to correspond its truth to the external world, but it must base its logic on induction rather than deduction. In this way its theories are only contingently true. To justify using induction, it could be said that it has been shown to work numerous times, therefore it must be true. But this argument uses induction to prove induction.

Science uses inductive logic and piles up large amounts of empirical evidence in order to draw conclusions about the real world. So for instance, the rising of the sun in the East every day is observed so a conclusion is reached that it will rise in the East again tomorrow. But despite the huge amount of empirical evidence for the sun rising in the East, it is still possible that it won't happen. Likewise, all scientific ‘facts’ are at best only statements about what will probably happen or continue to happen. There is always the possibility that things will be different.

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