Necessity and Change

Necessary facts don’t change. The table never changes from wood to plastic or metal: it is necessarily made of wood so can’t become made of plastic or metal. The number 3 is necessarily odd so can’t change into an even number. But the table can change its location or color and the number 3 can change its application (once it named the number of mice in a cage but later it stopped naming that number when the mice multiplied). Contingent facts can change: I can change from being a psychologist to being a philosopher, because I am not necessarily a psychologist (or was). So much, so indisputable. But is it right to say that necessary facts always remain the same in the same way some contingent facts remain the same? Some contingent facts don’t in fact change, but change is possible for them; but necessary facts can’t change—it isn’t in their nature to change. Necessary facts are necessarily changeless. But even this understates the case: they could not conceivablychange—change is completely alien to them. They necessarily necessarily don’t change; they are not even candidates for change. It is a kind of category mistake (a priori rejectable) to predicate change of them—like supposing that a number could dream or have sex. The question does not even arise. Necessities don’t change in the way propositions and geometrical figures don’t change: this is part of their very being. It isn’t an option. Necessities are permanent by virtue of their metaphysical status (as God is supposed to be). It isn’t a matter of luck or happenstance. So, to say that they never change, or necessarily never change, understates the depthof their permanence. They are not the kind of thing that could conceivably change. The table is not in the business of changing into plastic or metal; it has never even heard of such a thing. That would not to be it. Its entire identity is bound up with being made of wood.

I lay such emphasis on this point (which is not easily capturable in standard modal logic) because it seems to me that necessities don’t exist in time. Contingent facts exist in time, but necessary facts don’t. Time is alien to them, not their medium, not their ontological bag. They have never heard of time. They exist outside of time and want nothing to do with time. They don’t obtain for all time, except in the trivial sense that they are timeless. They are like numbers and other abstract objects—atemporal entities. Not omnitemporal (immortal, eternal) but anti-temporal, not even in that ballpark. It isn’t part of their “game”. Necessary facts (truths, objects) are conceptually opposed to time; they reject and repudiate time. It is not their medium of existence (similarly for space). We tend to underestimate their temporal indifference. Time has nothing to do with them, or them with it. Why should it—they don’t change. Where there is no possibility of change, there is no need for time. Modal logic and tense logic really have nothing to do with each other, despite their formal parallels. Predicating time or change of necessary facts is a category mistake, a conceptual foul-up. The two language games don’t overlap. There is a sharp disjunction between them. It is sheer sloppiness to say that necessities hold at all times and never change; this makes it sound as if they are just super-temporal and highly resistant to change. They are not supremely temporal and exceedingly tough—very stiff forms of contingency. They are not high-end industrial-strength contingency but creatures of a different species altogether. They don’t dochange and time; it’s not in their DNA. The fact that this table is made of wood is not a temporal fact at all, unlike the fact that it has a coffee cup on it. It is not a fact that obtains at time t and not at some other time. Nor is it a fact that obtains at all times. It obtains at no time. It hardly seems to obtain at all (too verb-like). Essence is timeless.[1]

[1] This subject is exceedingly difficult to get one’s mind around. The distinctions are gossamer-fine. But we must try.