Last week I was working on my sponsorship account of truth - an article submitted to Speculations VI, which I called "Immanence and Maintenance". Now I'm back to the book. Been working on a comparison between composing in a language and the monadology of fragments. In both cases, to use Quine's nice phrase, we deal with social arts. That reminded me of a talk I gave with Manuel years back in Nottingham, which had the apt title of "A linguistic turn of 360 degrees". I decided to make it more public here.
I´ve been wondering about whether we can formulate something about contingency along the lines of a principle of irreduction: aucune chose n´est par elle-même contingent ou necessaire . The principle asserts that necessity is always contingent on underlying fixed things: something is physically necessary (or contingent) given the fixed laws of nature, something is deontically contingent - allowed - or necessary - mandatory - given the fixed ethical rules (or laws of the land). Finally, something is logically necessary (or necessary simpliciter) given a fixed logic. The irreducible diversity of ethical rules, the absence of eternal laws of nature and the plurality of logical systems, if accepted, makes necessity relative to those parameters. An aggiornamento of Heraclitus would have that nothing is necessary comes what may. Surely, of couse, if there is no absolute necessity, there is no absolute contingency. We can then say that in a broader, more abstract level, things are up for grab...
Comments
Post a Comment