Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

although they cannot be proven. It’s worth keeping this term — brute fact — in mind as we proceed.

Let’s start with two terms — necessary and contingent.

A necessary statement or proposition is one that must be true. 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.

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…?’ We all of us use counterfactuals a great deal in everyday speech. The most famous, perhaps, is: ‘If I’d known you were coming then I’d have baked a cake.’ (In my case, sorry readers, this is not true.) The if/then arrangement of counterfactuals gives us a useful way of setting out proposals of what may or may not be true. The ‘if’ is a premise. The ‘then’ is a conclusion. When the conclusion follows from the premises then the argument is valid. When, in addition, the premises are true, the argument is sound.

Both necessary and contingent truths are

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