Necesidad física: algunas dificultades lógico-semánticas

Abstract

Jorge Bosch analyzes the concept of natural law in the previous article. Among the intuitive requirements which, in his opinion, a statement called “natural law” must satisfy, he mentions a condition equivalent to physical necessity. But this notion is not clear enough; therefore, he decides to analyze it independently. He tries to characterize the concept of contingency, and then obtain the concept of necessity by exclusion. In this effort, the notion of “cosmic accident statement” plays and important role in his work. This is, in fact, the most important contribution of his paper. In the present paper the author proposes to analyze the proposals advanced by Bosch in relation to this point.
The plan of the exposition is the following: in §I various theoretically different attitudes that can be assumed towards the concept of cosmic accident are described briefly; in §II the inadequacy of the characterizations of the concept made by Bosch are shown; in §III and IV some hints about other alternative approaches to the questions dealt with are made.
There is no general agreement among philosophers on the topic of physical necessity; although some of them think that there is an objective difference between necessary facts and contingent facts, there are others that think that such a difference is just an illusion because there is nothing similar to natural necessity. This discrepancy of opinions leads to alternative interpretations of the concept of cosmic accident, by way of which the second group of philosophers think that, in fact, we are faced with a pseudo-concept. This view, a pessimistic one, is designated (1), and the optimistic one, (2).
The followers of (2) may differ in many ways, but the article deals with only three of such possibilities.
According to (2a), it is possible to find an appropriate definition of the concept called “cosmic accident” using only standard notions of logic and semantics in the definiens. The second approach (2b) favors the use of more complicated notions of semantics. And the third one, (2c), recommends the use of complex ontological distinctions, such as causality, physical necessity, and so on. The above-mentioned attitudes permit the localization of Bosch’s perspective. Bosch belongs to the (2a) approach. Using Bosch’s tentative solution, it is possible, in the author’s belief, to clarify enigmatic notions such as physical necessity, etc., if and only if they give an adequate and satisfactory definition of cosmic accident. But this seems not to be the case. There are two kinds of reasons for thinking that the framework (2a) does not suffice to furnish adequate elucidations of the concepts in discussion. The author’s conjecture is that elementary logic and semantics are not enough for adequate elucidations of epistemological notions.
In section II the author presents the alleged insufficiencies of Bosch’s definitions by way of showing the troubles both definitions lead to. Technical difficulties are put into evidence and discussed in detail throughout section III.
A skeptical mind would be more impressed by the difficulties described in sections I and II than by the constructive suggestions proposed in III, and would conclude that the only reasonable attitude is (1), consisting in denying all meaning to notions such as contingency, natural necessity, etc. A position consistent with (1) is the interpretation that actually there is no reason to deny legality to examples such as that of the moa. If the concept of law is identified with the true, strict universal statement, then the desired result is obtained. But this is unsatisfactory, even though we do not have any formal criteria for discriminating those statements. Statements such as the example of the moas simply do not seem to be natural laws. Therefore there are other ways to treat the problem, namely with the pragmatical approach. Surely a pragmatical characterization of a law is considerably vague, but, perhaps this is the price that must be paid.
The observations made in this paper only pretend to point out and refine the problems inherent in Bosch’s tentative solution by changing their focus from semantic to pragmatic.

(Arturo Cisneros)