From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!ames!olivea!uunet!news.smith.edu!orourke Wed Apr 22 12:03:58 EDT 1992
Article 5139 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: A rock implements every FSA
Message-ID: <1992Apr17.211851.18106@sophia.smith.edu>
Date: 17 Apr 92 21:18:51 GMT
References: <1992Apr14.064644.16892@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Apr17.142040.11231@husc3.harvard.edu> <1992Apr17.202258.20091@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Smith College, Northampton, MA, US
Lines: 17

In article <1992Apr17.202258.20091@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> 
	chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:

 >Personally, I find bizarre the idea that such blatantly contingent
 >facts as the law of gravity or the mass of an electron could be
 >metaphysically necessary.  

This is an interesting point to me, and I would like to know where
Kripke discusses it.  I couldn't find it in Naming & Necessity, but
I haven't read that cover-to-cover since I passed the age of reason :-).
It seems what is or is not contingent depends on the status of
accepted physics.  Isn't it possible that the law of gravity must
hold in any existent universe, that it follows inexorably from the
existence of *any* matter?  Of course we don't (yet?) know this is
the case, but it seems that contingency is a function of advances in
physics, which are a function of time.  So contingency is really
contingency(t).


