‘For no-one is known to another so intimately as he is known to himself, and yet no-one is so well known even to himself that he can be sure as to his own conduct on the morrow.’ (Augustine)
This is a brief post on contingency, as a
follow up on ‘Who’s the magician?’.
‘Contingency’ is a term that has various meanings. Here I shall disregard its
most general meaning, that of being in some way dependent on someone or some
thing, as in “The physical world is contingent/dependent upon the activity of
God”. Of course it does not follow that what brings about the physical
world, must itself be contingent. God’s
existence is not contingent, nor dependent on another, and yet God’s action may
be. That’s another question, or rather, set of questions.
That leaves two other senses of contingent; first,
two-way contingency or alternativity as we may call it, and epistemic
contingency, as when the unexpected, the fortuitous or the surprising occurs. It is these two
senses that I wish to reflect on a little. First, two-way contingency.
Two-way contingency
Two-way contingency
Here we are chiefly if not exclusively concerned
with contingency and intelligent action, with human contingency. All I will say
about divine agency here is that many postulate that two-way contingency is
characteristic of divine activity even if human action is never a case of two-way
contingency, and the converse of this is also possible.
Two-way contingency is what free human
agents possess, according to libertarians or indeterminists or
incompatibilists, and that such contingency is necessary and sufficient for the
possession of ‘free will’. This indeterminism entails the following: that If A
freely chooses to do X then, given that the world in all respects, the inner and outer worlds
of A, were identical to that in which X
was chosen, not-X could have been chosen, or Y could have been chosen, rather
than the X that was in fact chosen by A. Hence this is two-way
contingency, or alternativity. To be more precise, the two-way contingency is two way simultaneous contingency. This idea of simultaneous two-way contingency goes back to at least to the Jesuits of the 16th century. As Molina put it
I shall not rehearse the arguments pro and
con of this position. I am not a libertarian but a compatibilist, for
theological and philosophical reasons. Though baldly stated, compatibilism may
be consistent with all manner of different determinisms. Again, I do not wish
to select a preferred determinism or determinisms. But whichever one selects
rules out two-way contingency.
Epistemic contingency
Epistemic contingency
The second view of contingency is epistemic. It arises for the agent in cases
of his ignorance; and it is a characteristic of human action. If it is not a necessary feature of it, then it
is most certainly a deeply embedded fact about it, as Augustine reminds us. Certainly
it is a necessary condition of choice.
Stressing the importance of states of
such contingency is significant, for it identifies a central feature of human life,
and not a freak case. It underlines a kind
of two-way contingency that falls short of the metaphysical contingency beloved
of the libertarians.
Epistemic contingency can never be
characteristic of God who has no states of ignorance, it being the case that
all things are naked and open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do.
However, I shall suggest that it is a vital ingredient in human action, both
from the point of the creatureliness of it, and of the freedom of it. I don’t
suppose this to require much argument. At this point I do not think that the
language of determinism and even of ‘compatibilism’ serves this view, the
denial of the crucial feature of libertarianism mentioned earlier, vey
well. ‘Determinism’ and ‘compatibilism’ unglossed
suggest to many people some relentless monocausalism, whereas our lives are full of known
unknowns both trivial and weighty, and the lines of causal influence are from being monocausal, like a kettle boiling but criss
cross in complex ways. Jonathan Edwards offered this against this monocausal misunderstanding:
But the dependence and
connection between acts of volition or choice, and their causes, according to
established laws, is not so sensible and obvious. And we observe that choice is
as it were a new principle of motion and action, different from that established
law and order in things which is most obvious, that is seen especially in
both corporeal and sensible things; and also that choice often interposes,
interrupts and alters the chain of events in these external objects, and causes
‘em to proceed otherwise than they would do, if let alone, and left to go on
according to the laws of motion among themselves.
(Freedom of the Will, Yale Edn, 158-9)
Exceptionless chains of events are often
invisible, because our determined choices
interrupt them, stop certain of them, changing their character, sending
them in a different direction.
So Joe has a new yellow tie. Is he going to
wear it when his Aunt calls this morning? He cannot make up his mind what to do, even though
it’s already 10 am. Then at 10.10 he remembers that the new tie is in fact a
gift from his Aunt. That settles it. At 10.10 he decides to wear his new yellow
tie. Up until 10.10am Joe has been in a state of two-way epistemic contingency
with regard to what he shall wear around his neck. But he is brought out of it,
made decisive, by a sudden memory. That occurrence was not chosen by Joe, it
suddenly came to him. But it gives him a good reason, perhaps the best reason,
to choose to wear the tie. (This business is not mechanical in any literal
sense, but Joe immediately recognises in the propositional content of the memory a good reason
to wear the tie.)
This is a characteristic feature of the
human condition; not knowing what to do. Mercifully, not all occasions that
call for action are like this, but
sufficient of them are to make this a characteristic feature of human agency.
Necessarily, we choose when we don’t already know what to do. They have some
additional features that are worth pointing out.
Intrinsic to Joe’s situation is the belief
that he could choose to wear his new yellow tie or some other tie, or be
tieless. Programmed or drugged or drilled or amnesiac individuals, or someone
who has rigid rules of dress, do not – or shall we say, to avoid complications
- may not. Nor do sheep or squirrels, much less bees and ants. To humans some
of the future at least is open. And this is intrinsic to living a life. To know
the future would be already to have made up one’s mind, or to have had one’s
mind made up. If Joe knew at 10 am that he would wear his new tie to please his
Aunt, then his mind is already made up., and the future in respect of tie wearing, closed. The future is open in that with respect
to some features of it his mind is not already made up until he remembers, or
some other factor occurs.
This epistemic alternativity, I repeat, is
not a way of trying to smuggle in metaphysical alternativity, which I personally
do not hanker after. But it nevertheless carries with it the belief that the
future world is shaped for alternative decisions. The future comes to us, day
by day, as calling for choices. Of course, one can adopt a policy of shutting
down alternatives. We develop habits, over time, our characters develop
contours which make certain kinds of indecision infrequent or impossible. Hume
was impressed by such features. Such habits apart, we carry with us the belief
that having done A in some situation, we could have done B instead. We have
this as a well-formed belief. We could have decided thus, because we have
decided thus on other similar occasions, and because there are people sufficiently
like us who choose the way we have rejected
on this occasion. Occasionally we
choose knowingly against the odds, and sometimes out of pure whimsy. So though
we do not face the open universe of the Open Theist, say, we face a universe that
resembles it, and has features in common with it. Though not, to repeat, a
future that is metaphysically open, thank God.
