Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

First up we have necessary and contingent truth – and within each of these two categories we have two sub-categories – natural and absolute. An absolute necessary truth then is one that could not possibly be untrue. Into this select category some would place God, others mathematics and Euclidean geometry, whilst others would just leave this category blank. A natural necessity is something that is provisionally true but could have been otherwise – could have been false. Most of what we think we know fits in here. A natural contingency is kind of the reverse – something that could have been true but just happens not to be. And then we come to the absolute contingent category of truth – something that would generally be regarded as untrue. But an absolute contingency is still not quite an impossibility. There’s still just a tiny slither of possibility through which spontaneously materialising rhinoceroses might appear. Wittgenstein’s point therefore was that this category of truth should not be empty and we should never class anything as absolutely impossible. Well, you may be thinking, that’s straight-forward enough – it’s just a case of deciding which things fit into which categories. And

anyway, does it really matter if there’s some disagreement as to what goes where? That certainly seems to be the case. But even several hundred years before Wittgenstein there was a strange and unnerving idea going around. The idea was that, if something could be imagined – no matter how unlikely – then it achieved a kind of ghostly reality, even if we decided it wasn’t true. So, with this notion,

Wittgenstein’s rhinoceros sort of exists. Let’s pick up another example. All unicorns are

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