Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

vicious. Of course, we believe there are no

unicorns, but we have a clear idea of them, so any statement about them has a sort of truth value. You, dear reader, may have thought that unicorns are most likely benign rather than vicious creatures – they may be imaginary, but they have a reputation!

The question of the existence or non-existence of things was addressed by Saint Anselm in his ontological proof for the existence of God. Anselm suggested that existence is better than non-existence – which seems reasonable. But Immanuel Kant suggested that saying something exists adds nothing to what we know. ‘Existence is not a predicate’, he said. (This was back in the day when people knew what predicates are!) What, roughly, he meant was that if I say there is a cloud in the sky and then add that the cloud also exists, this has not provided you with any new information. But clarifying whether or not something exists DOES help us sometimes, when there is doubt over whatever we are talking about. On this note, back to unicorns!

We could re-state the vicious unicorns example in a particular way, so that its truth or falsehood becomes more apparent:

IF there are unicorns THEN they are vicious. This IF, THEN formulation is known as a counterfactual. And the one thing about

counterfactuals is that we use them all the time. Most of human life takes on the IF, THEN formula, and usually it is to speculate if things could be better for us or if things might possibly get worse. There can be lots of THEN’s leading from single IF’s. The really interesting thing about counterfactuals is that they can suggest whole other worlds. A bit like the rhino and the

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