Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

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.

‘Identity’ — the idea that a thing must be identical to itself — is one contender for absolute necessity. And there’s the thought that a thing cannot both exist and not exist at the same time. And also, the idea that nothingness is impossible. And also, the existence of God.

And then it is claimed that the axioms of mathematics are either necessarily true or false — they cannot be only contingently true. Likewise, 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 they are. Thus they are ‘natural’ — in the sense of, ‘what usually seems to happen’ — rather than absolute. Also, it’s conceivable that some law of nature may be broken — so a natural law is really just a possible rather than an absolute necessity. As such, we have contingent natural truths — things that could reasonably be assumed to be true but just happen not to be. Are we left with anything? Well, probably just with — something is going on! That seems to be the only

37