Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

noted above, this does not stop some philosophers speculating on the reality of these ‘absolute contingencies’.

If we had sufficient observations then maybe we could find a theory that fits them all. That’s the dream of science. But maybe we won’t be able to collect enough facts. Or maybe we won’t find a theory. Or, perhaps worse, maybe we find more than one theory and cannot decide which is best. Even if there is perfect empirical knowledge of the world then there may still be competing theories to explain how everything works. So there could be entire alternative views, which might be coherent and might offer equally valid ways for us to look at the world. It might never be possible to decide which is the correct theory, even with all the evidence. There might be several versions of coherent truth that correspond with the world without us ever being able to determine if any of them is the ‘correct’ version.

On the other hand, there may be only one correct way to see and describe the world, so in that case the truths of this world would be as close as we could get to necessary truths. That — as I’ve said — is the dream of science, and indeed the dream of philosophy — facts that could not be other than they are.

If we achieved this goal then perhaps we could say we had reached a kind of perfection. But the worrying thing — even from what we think we know already — is that we seem to see imperfections, asymmetries, even ‘flaws’, in the way the world actually works.

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