Abstract

Philosophers concerned with what they've seen as the epistemological and metaphysical problems of necessity have tried to answer the questions, "How is knowledge of necessary truths possible, given that it does not arise from experience?" and, "What do necessary truths state or what in the world corresponds to necessary truths, given that necessary truths do not describe objective features of the world?" I challenge the "given" in both cases. ;The epistemological problem. Some philosophers have supported the claim that our knowledge of necessary truths does not arise from experience by claiming that our judgments of necessary truth cannot be justified by experience. Leibniz, Russell, Hempel, and Ayer have argued that while our knowledge of necessary truths is certain, experience can never yield certain knowledge. I show that on every plausible understanding of "certain knowledge" the claim that all and only knowledge of necessary truths is certain is either vacuous or false. ;Frege and the positivists argued that since necessary truths cannot conflict with experience, judgments of necessary truth cannot be justified by experience. But in one sense of "conflict with"--where it means "inconsistent with"--neither necessary nor contingent truths can conflict with experience; in a second sense of "conflict with"--where it means "is disconfirmed by"--both necessary and contingent truths can conflict with experience. ;Descartes, Leibniz, Whewell, Russell, and Chisholm have all argued that experience can tell us what is the case, but not what must be the case. These arguments all rely on an impoverished conception of empirical justification. I show that the techniques we use to acquire knowledge of necessary truths are precisely the techniques we use to acquire knowledge of contingent truths; thus, skepticism about the possibility of knowing necessary truths on the basis of experience can be maintained only within a general skepticism about the possibility of knowing contingent truths on the basis of experience. ;I also consider direct arguments for the claim that our knowledge of necessary truths does not require experience. ;The metaphysical problem. Many philosophers have argued that necessary truths state nothing about the world. I show that Wittgenstein's argument question-beggingly presupposes that the world is everything that is contingently the case, that the positivists' argument relies on the same ambiguity of "conflict with" discussed above, that Sidelle's argument relies on a use-mention confusion, and that Quine's claim that necessity is a feature of our descriptions of things not of the things described, relies on a failure to appreciate a scope ambiguity in the types of sentences he uses to make his point--those involving both modal operators and definite descriptions. ;The widely endorsed arguments I consider give us no reason to believe that necessary truths are any different from other truths in either their power to describe the world or their susceptibility to being known through experience. At the end, we see clearly how we can continue to treat necessity unproblematically--as an ordinary feature of the world like any other and as a feature known like any other