Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

analytic truths. However, even if we accept this, then what is derived from first principles is still not guaranteed to also be true.

(Sometimes it’s claimed that what is derived from induction should also not be claimed to be new knowledge, which is especially confusing! We’d have to conjecture that there are brute facts out there that logically lead to other brute facts, but of which we are not immediately aware. Perhaps though, working through Euclid’s geometry, for instance, this makes sense. The less obvious appears, as if by magic, from the obvious.)

A synthetic statement is a statement based on observation, but it is said to be contingently true rather than necessarily true, that is, it is open to question, it could be proved wrong. (So from our necessary/contingent distinction, a synthetic truth is a contingent truth of the ‘natural’ variety.) Reverting to our contrast of analytic and synthetic truth — generally it is therefore, a posteori, that is, a truth arrived at after an observation has been made. Kant however sought to prove that at least some synthetic statements are necessarily a priori — amongst then the assumption of time and space. We will pick up on this again in future chapters.

Deduction begins with generalisations and moves to a particular. The logical steps used in deduction are such that the statements derived from the axioms are also necessarily true, although, of course, we have already seen this to be suspect.

Induction moves from particulars to

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