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A Kind of Necessary Truth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Norman J. Brown
Norman J. Brown
Affiliation:
Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario
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In what sense can we not help thinking that every event has a cause? One answer is, that this begs the question: we can think of events as uncaused. Well, we can think of events in isolation from causes, and we can formulate the proposition that some events have no cause, or that no event needs a cause. But the first of these does not constitute thinking of an event as not caused, but thinking of an event not-as-caused (or, not thinking of the event as caused); while the implications of the second, forming anti-causal propositions, are obscure. I can verbally formulate the proposition ‘some events are uncaused’; the question is, whether it makes sense to affirm it. Now I can verbally formulate the proposition ‘some triangles are quadrilateral’, and we must not say that this does not make sense; for I know the criteria for being a triangle, and I know the criteria for being quadrilateral; and the proposition simply asserts that there are some figures which satisfy both sets of criteria. That this is logically impossible is true, but it is not unintelligible. It does not, however, make sense to affirm a logical impossibility, simply because I cannot meaningfully affirm what I do not understand and believe to be possible (though of course I can meaningfully affirm what I believe to be false), and if I understand what it means to be both triangular and quadrilateral, I cannot also believe it to be possible, since to understand what it means for a plane figure to have three sides is to understand that this excludes its having any other number of sides, e.g. four. But ‘some events are not caused’ is not logically incoherent in this way, or not apparently so; for in thinking of an event (as opposed to thinking of an effect) I am by definition thinking of a happening (whether caused or not) in isolation from any cause; I am thinking of it not as caused. Thus ‘some events are uncaused’ is not incoherent ex vi terminorum.

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Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 50 , Issue 191 , January 1975, pp. 37 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1975

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References

1 In the interpretation of St Thomas's doctrine of judgment, I acknowledge my debt to the excellent account by Hoenen, Peter S.J., in his Reality and Judgment according to St Thomas (Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, 1952).Google Scholar

2 It may be said of both Kant and Aquinas that their theory of knowledge is critical not because as epistemologists they provide a critique which in some way justifies an unreflective judgment of common sense but because they uncover in the judgement of common sense a critical element which it is the philosopher's duty—and ability—only to make articulate and not to invent. But the transcendental elements in Kant's view go beyond this.

3 It was, of course, the reading of the world as a nexus of interrelated, causally interacting substances that the arguments of the transcendental deduction set out to explain; but to see an interpretation as presupposing or embodying the various possibilities of logical judgment is not to justify such judgments but only to pose in a sharper form the question, Why should they be possible?—a question unanswerable on the Humean assumptions from which Kant started out.

4 It may be thought that this argument rules out the possibility that the world had a beginning in time. This is not so. It entails only what is surely true, that if the world in whatever form came into existence at what we must call the first moment in time, we could not understand the appearance of the primal cosmic reality as in any ordinary sense an event.

5 My attention was drawn to this proof by a former colleague, Professor G. F. Cowley.

6 I must confess that the proposal to interpret time as a discontinuous succession of instants, having duration in which no change takes place, seems a paradoxical one. But I am not certain that it is internally incoherent as an abstract conception, and it may be that a greater familiarity with the matrix of subatomic physics than I possess would in fact render it intelligible. It is in fact part of the thesis of this paper that no abstract conceptual scheme can be understood in abstraction from all matrices whatever; and what cannot be understood cannot be pronounced incoherent either except in the purely superficial sense of a straight verbal contradiction. Thus just as some concepts in abstraction may wear an air of spurious clarity and distinctness, others may wear an air of spurious paradox.

7 I should like to thank my colleague Professor E. J. Bond for his perceptive criticism of an earlier draft of this paper, which saved it from a number of needless obscurities.