Is Necessity Good?
Is Necessity Good?
Is there any sense in the idea that necessity is good and contingency bad? Is it somehow better to be necessary than contingent? I think there is a feeling that this is so, but it is hard to articulate. We know that many contingent truths or facts are bad, but are any necessary truths bad? Is it bad for bachelors to be unmarried or 3 + 5 to equal 8 or this table to be made of wood? No, but it is bad for bachelors to be unhappy or for there to be only 3 tigers left or for this table to land on my foot. Some contingent truths are good, but some are not, whereas all necessary truths are, if not good, at least not bad. If we thought that God created necessary truths, while Satan had a hand in some of the contingent truths, then we would suppose the necessary to be better than the contingent. And isn’t contingency more chaotic than necessity, less written into the nature of things? Moreover, moral truth is surely necessary not contingent, so the two are joined at that point. Still, it is hard to see how necessity could be intrinsically good and contingency intrinsically bad: why is a world of necessary truths better than a world of contingent truths? Is it more intelligible, or more beautiful? Is the association between necessity and intellect what makes it better than contingency, which is associated with the senses? Is necessity more reliable? Plato would surely prefer it to contingency, being so close to universals and hence the Good; but independent of his theory is there any deep connection? Is it perhaps that when we know a necessary truth we know about all possible worlds, while knowledge of contingent truth concerns just this world—and knowledge is a good thing? That sounds on the right lines, but it is hard to express the point rigorously. It is true that some of us enjoy necessary truth more than contingent truth, but is that just an idiosyncrasy of some minds? Is it just nice to think that some things couldn’t have been otherwise, thus sparing us of any responsibility for changing them? The question needs further thought.
How is a particular table’s being made of wood a necessary truth? It could have been made of metal or plastic.
You made me laugh: a ground floor confusion of epistemic and metaphysical necessity. I gather you have never read or heard of Saul Kripke.
My feeling is that “Good necessity” makes as much sense as “beautiful necessity” — and that’s poetic/metaphoric sense.
What about “beautiful proof” and “beautiful truth”? What things are beautiful non-metaphorically?
I’d say that beautiful truths and proofs are also metaphorically beautiful. Examples of non-metaphorical beauty: some forests and oceans, some people, some works of art, some animals especially in motion, some tennis players game techniques, some sunsets, some music etc. I wouldn’t argue that there is an absolute demarcation line between these two kinds, and I’d acknowledge a strong context, epistemic and cultural dependence of the actual judgment. It’s a bit like the distinction between porn and non-porn imagery that a judge famously described as something like “it is difficult to define precisely in words but we know one when we see it”. To summarize the hand waving point with more hand waving: I believe not every instance of beauty is of a poetic kind just like not every nude image is porn.
I see a pattern here: sensuous things are literally beautiful but intellectual things are not. We could also speak of primary beauty and secondary beauty. I think when mathematicians speak of a beautiful proof, or philosophers of a beautiful counterexample, they are not speaking metaphorically, still less poetically; but they may concede that such things are beautiful in a derivative sense (or they may not). In this sense necessary truths may be said to be beautiful.
Valid inferences don’t take us from better to worse, not from consistent premisses to inconsistent conclusions, not from true premisses to false conclusions, and not from necessary premisses to contingent conclusions.
All good qualities.
Consistency, truth, necessity, are all good qualities in judgements, beliefs, assertions, and the like. Why else would we want our inferences to preserve them? You seemed however to be looking for a sense in which necessarily true propositions are somehow better propositions than propositions that are only contingent.
Not propositions (or sentences) but facts. Some facts (states of affairs) are better than others–are necessary facts better than contingent facts?
You are now approaching Aristotle’s idea that necessary substances are superior to contingent substances.
The old boy was pretty smart! I did not know that. Is it because necessary substances are also immortal?
Not being liable to die is certainly part of what Aristotle admires about necessary substances. More generally, his idea is the superiority of the independent over the dependent. So a even a contingent substance is superior to its accidents (only in Wonderland can a smile be independent of the cat whose smile it is).
Even the word “accident” is somewhat derogatory, as opposed to “substance” (“substantial”). Plato certainly regards the unchanging as superior to the changeable–more real. Are necessary facts more real than contingent facts? When someone says a certain book is “necessary” he certainly implies it is good–like “essential”.