Contingency
Contingency
SEE FOREKNOWLEDGE; SEE PREDESTINATION.
Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
Contingency
(Lat. contingere, to touch on all sides) In its broadest philosophical usage a state of affairs is said to be contingent if it may and also may not be. A certain event, for example, is contingent if, and only if, it may come to pass and also may not come to pass. For this reason contingency is not quite equivalent in meaning to possibility (q.v.); for while a possible state of affairs is one which may be, it may at the same time be necessary, and hence it would be false to say that it may not be.
In this broad sense contingency appears always to imply a reference to some basis in relation to which a given thing may be said to be contingent, and in view of the two referents most commonly employed it is possible to distinguish two chief types(1) logical contingency, and (2) physical contingency. The first is contingency with respect to the laws of logic, the second contingency with respect to the laws of nature. A given state of affairs, e.g., the existence of a snowflake with a given shape, is logically contingent in that the laws of logic do not suffice to establish that such a thing does or does not exist. This same state of affairs would not ordinarily be held to be physically contingent, however, for, although the laws of nature alone do not suffice to determine that there is such a snowflake, still it would be held on the general hypothesis of determinism that, given the specific conditions under which the water was frozen, it was determined by physical laws that a snowflake would exist and that it would have this shape and no other.
A narrower, less philosophical employment of “contingent” emphasizes the aspect of dependence of one state of affairs upon another state of affairs in accordance with the laws of nature. In this usage an event A is said to be contingent upon B when the occurrence of A depends upon the occurrence of B, and it is usually implied that the occurrence of B is itself uncertain. — F.L.W.
In metaphysicsThe opposite of determinism, which holds that free activity may enter causally into natural processes. See Boutroux. — R.T.F.
Leibniz distinguished contingent truths (verites de fait) from necessarv truths of reason (verites de raison), Hume (q.v.) regarded all causal assertions as contingent upon certain habits of the mind. See Cause, Probability.