necessaty

Philosophers have tried accounting for necessity in terms of certainty, in terms of the analytic, in terms of many world possibility. in terms of general background belief. in terms of universal generalisation, or a generalisation that is found to hold universaly in experience. Some of these necessaties claim to be of different types from others.

The analytic response comes up against the problem of how we can know what is meant. If we can know what is meant by a word or phrase then it would seem plausible to suppose that if we also knew what was meant by some other words or phrases, then we should be able to tell from this whether what is meant by one phrase is included by what is meant by another word or phrase. However, how DO we know what is meant by a word or phrase? This model would work well if meanings were objects before the mind that the mind could inspect, and compare with one another; either within the mind, or even within experience. But if the best we can do is to admit we understand meanings by training and by experience of and reactions to our linguistic communities practces then this hardly seems an unshakeable foundation to justify our certainty or the supposed necessity of candidate analytic truths.

We can try to make sense of necessity in terms of other worlds; Something is necessarily true if there is no possible world in which it is false. But how do you know there is no such other possible world? If you only think this because you think there couldn't be, that impossibility is based on this impossibility, which is the original problem, left unexplained.

Universal beliefs, or generalisations or experience may supplie a way that makes us think something is necessary, or certain, but they are not a sufficient reason to justify such an opinion. Something can be universally true in everybodies experience although there are cases not yet in anyones experience where it is false. E.g. all swans were white in everyones experience, until black ones were discovered in Australia.

In all this there is an obvious candidate for necessity that is left out; if there is a sufficient reason for something to happen, and nothing sufficient to stop it happening then that something will necessarily happen. For instance, suppose there is a crushing weight falling of a cliff onto a flimsy object below, that wieght will necessarily crush the flimsy object unless some other power greater that the crushing weight interviens between the two to stop it.

Addition is also necessary, in that if the objects involved are self sufficient to make the result that result must occur.--this seems half a generalisation of experience and half a truth of judgement. It is a truth of experience that should be found in experience, otherwise we can't see how the objective situation would be sufficient to explain the result.