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On the Three Types of Science

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(5) Completely nonrestrictive statements are necessarily true---the true—the nonexistential ones of mathematics, negatively or hypothetically true, the existential ones of metaphysics, positively or categorically true. Completely restrictive statements, by the same token, are necessarily false. On the other hand, partially restrictive statements are true or false only contingently.

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(7) Possibilities are to be distinguished as either (merely) ontological or (also) ontic---_ontic—this distinction roughly corresponding to the familiar distinction between (merely) "logical" and (also) "real" possibilities. (The first distinction is to be preferred because, on the view that logical (_de dictu) and real (de re) modality are convertible or coextensive, any possibility whatever is both logical and real.) An ontological possibility is any possibility that, logically, is coherently conceivable and, ontologically, not incompatible with the strictly necessary conditions of the possibility of concrete reality as such, while an ontic possibility is, in addition, more or less probable given the contingent conditions of reality as of a given time and place.

20 July 2008