Contingency (philosophy)

On the other hand, since a contingent statement is always possible but not necessarily true, we can always conceive it to be false in a world in which it is also always logically achievable.

Philosophers such as Jaakko Hintikka and Arthur Pap consider the concept of analytic truths, for example (as distinct from synthetic ones) to be ambiguous since in practice they are defined or used in different ways.

[9] Harry Deutsch acknowledged Prior's concern and outlines rudimentary notes about a "Logic for Contingent Beings.

"[10] Deutsch believes that the solution to Prior's concern begins by removing the assumption that logical statements are necessary.

The first view, considered notably by Boethius,[13] supposes that Aristotle's intentions were to argue against this logical determinism only by claiming future contingent statements are neither true nor false.

The opposing view, with an early version from Cicero,[17] is that Aristotle was not attempting to disqualify assertoric statements about future contingents from being either true or false, but that their truth value was indeterminant.

Medieval thinkers studied logical contingency as a way to analyze the relationship between Early Modern conceptions of God and the modal status of the world qua His creation.

[21] Early Modern writers studied contingency against the freedom of the Christian Trinity not to create the universe or set in order a series of natural events.

In the 16th century, European Reformed Scholasticism subscribed to John Duns Scotus' idea of synchronic contingency, which attempted to remove perceived contradictions between necessity, human freedom and the free will of God to create the world.

[23] The eighteenth-century philosopher Jonathan Edwards in his work A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will which is supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame (1754), reviewed the relationships between action, determinism, and personal culpability.

[24] Prior interprets[25] Edwards by supposing that any necessary consequence of any already necessary truth would "also 'always have existed,' so that it is only by a necessary connexion (sic) with 'what has already come to pass' that what is still merely future can be necessary.