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Language has many uses, and it mayor may not be used cognitively or intellectually. But if it is so used, it unavoidably makes reference to reality. Language so used, like the thought it formulates, is always about something other than just itself. It is about the process we call "nature," or "the creative advance," and the products that this process either has produced or is capable of producing. Take away all reference to the process and its actual or possible (conceivable) products, and there is no longer any reason to suppose that one is still thinking or speaking coherently, provided one's intention is to use language cognitively.

Meaning in science--andscience—and, arguably, in the extraordinary ontological science, metaphysics, as well--is well—is a relation requiring a term; and, although the term need not, in ordinary cases, have the mode of actuality, it must in all cases have some mode of reality, the minimal mode, and the only alternative to actuality, being real, ontological possibility.

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The real is that to which true affirmations refer---the refer—the object of correct affirmations, that which measures their truth. 

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In order to complete the unification of real and logical possibility, the final step is to regard even natural laws, so far as genuinely contingent or with thinkable alternatives, as themselves products of the creative---advance as creative—advance—as themselves emergent aspects of reality

Logical possibility implies something about reality, as does logical necessity.

The necessary is whatever is common to a set of possibilities. To be necessary is to be implied by the actualization of no matter which of the set of possibilities in question.

If the set is all possibilities whatever, all that is genuinely conceivable, or coherently thinkable, then what is common to the set is strictly, unconditionally necessary. If, on the contrary, the set is not all human possibilities--or all possibilities—or all possibilities of any understanding existence, human or not--then not—then what is common to the set is only broadly, conditionally necessary, i.e., necessary to any and all human possibilities, or to any and all possibilities of an existence that understands.

The modality of x is x 's classification according as its appropriate mode of exemplification in existence is either contingent or necessary---ornecessary—or, alternatively, according as whether its nonexistence is or not conceivable.

The conventional view of logicians is that existential statements can be true only contingently. But the more adequate view is that existential statements on lower logical levels--those —those mentioning definite particulars, or the special properties of such--can such—can only be contingently true. But it's arguable that existential statements not mentioning definite particulars or the special properties therof thereof are not contingently, but necessarily, true.

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If the essence of God integrates all metaphysical truth; and if to know this essence--essence—"the abstract, impossibly unexemplified essence of deity"--is —is "to know next to nothing," then to know metaphysical truth is to know next to nothing. And this, of course, is why we may be able to know it after all.

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But if the idea of a possibly nonexisting God is of neither of these, it is of nothing and has the same content of as nothing, and therefore is not an idea of God after all.

Although necessary truths are implies implied by any and every contingent fact, this is only by virtue of what any such fact has in common with any other even conceivable fact.

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