Friday, February 27, 2026

Fiction Is Not Exempt From Necessary Truths

Without resorting to sheer introspective imaginings, there is a way one can see examples of things that could have been quite different in our physical universe and historical timeline: art/entertainment, and storytelling in particular.  Only logical axioms and other necessary truths are ultimately necessary in themselves (for instance, it could not be the case that nothing is true, as then this would be true).  They could not have been false or different, and so they are the only things that do not depend on anything else and that have supreme foundationality.  Anything else at all lacks their inherent veracity and therefore could have differed in any way consistent with what cannot be false.  Concrete examples of fictional works are unnecessary to realize these things, as helpful as they can be for prompting some people.

Others will not recognize these facts.  People who complain about "scientific inaccuracies" in films, among other mediums, have likely never even considered that there is no logical necessity in the laws of nature persisting exactly as they are in the future or being constant across the whole of the cosmos.  They also might think that scientific matters can actually be proven, as opposed to the logical prerequisites or ramifications of a given scientific concept being proven or some amount of fallible sensory evidence being amassed for a given scientific idea.  It is not just that scientific paradigms and phenomena cannot be proven beyond perceptions, though this is true.  Things like the number of human limbs or the direction in which gravity pulls items on Earth could have been quite different—and the same is true of historical events.

An alternate history where the Black Plague never happened could have been recorded history instead, and fiction could be used to explore this.  World War II only happened because of contingent factors that could have been rather different if political entities had made different decisions or the preceding circumstances were not the same.  In contrast, World War II could have resulted in a more prolonged Nazi presence and a very different world, as portrayed in the game Wolfenstein: Youngblood.  As long as something is logically possible by not contradicting necessary truths, it could be true unless it contradicts some other contingent truth, if one cannot disprove it, and even if it is untrue, it could have been the case.

Like certain fictional characters pretending as if something happening before them is impossible when reason alone proves there is no contradiction in it, some consumers of art might think that a portrayed condition or event is impossible when it is not, although something truly logically impossible could never be depicted anyway precisely because it is impossible, such as with God or a planet both existing and not existing at once.  Also, necessary truths cannot be false even in fiction.  There is no story where it could be true that nothing is true or true that nothing follows or does not follow from a given concept by logical necessity, for then it would follow by necessity from the nature of this supposed fictional reality that logical necessity is false.  Such things are intrinsically true and thus cannot be false even in the whole of fiction.

There is no hypothetically true situation, including one that could have been the case, where logic is false.  This is why the tenets of the ontological argument for God's existence really are only correct concerning the necessary truths of reason and not the existence of a deity that would still be governed by logic, which is true in itself and thus metaphysically independent of God [1].  Characters in fiction might hold the belief that something logically necessary is false or that something logically impossible is true, just like the player of a video game or the reader of a novel, but they could only be wrong.  No escape from logical axioms and other abstract truths stemming from them is possible.


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