Contingency

Date Created: 14 Oct 2026

Last Updated: 14 Oct 2026

Back to Personal Wiki

I find (from what has been told me) that there is nothing savage or barbarous about those peoples, but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. Montaigne, Essays I:31 On The Cannibals

There is current among those who philosophize the conviction that, while past thinkers have reflected in their systems the conditions and perplexities of their own day, present-day philosophy in general, and one’s own philosophy in particular, is emancipated from the influence of that complex of institutions which forms culture. Bacon, Descartes, Kant, each thought with fervour that he was founding philosophy anew because he was placing it securely upon an exclusive intellectual basis, exclusive, that is, of everything but intellect. The movement of time has revealed the illusion; it exhibits as the work of philosophy the old and ever new undertaking of adjusting the body of traditions which constitute the actual mind of man to scientific tendencies and political aspirations which are novel and incompatible with received authorities. Philosophers are parts of history, caught in its movement; creators perhaps in some measure of its future, but also assuredly creatures of its past. John Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization

It’s not a comfortable answer. It’s a challenging answer. It’s challenging partly because it requires admitting that, since the past version of us would be wrong from the point of view of our present, the present version of us is probably also wrong judged by an imagined us fortunate enough to be born in the future. Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance

Contingency

Anyone who has spent some time in the study of history understands that we are creatures of our own time. Anyone who has spent some time interacting with cultures other than their own understands that we are creatures of our own place. Anyone who has spent some time in the study of public opinion (or other areas of mass belief) understands that most of our beliefs come not from careful inquiry but through trusting other humans–past and present–as sources of information.

Against a view of our beliefs as objective, logically necessary, emancipated from the ignorance of the past, secure in their foundations, we find instead our beliefs to be fallible, contingent, dependent on the context in which we exist. The point is not that the evidence available to us is not better than the evidence available in the past, but rather that many of the beliefs we hold today will almost certainly be rejected in the future, or would be rejected today by someone from a different culture. Nor is the point is not that any given time or place is homogenous in its beliefs. Rather, it is that each of us has a set of ‘live options’, to use William James’s phrase:

Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. William James, The Will to Believe

The set of live options for our beliefs available to us depends in no small part on the time and place in which we live, and our particular background within it. Those of us raised as, say, Christians in the UK might have a few Christian denominations, agnosticism, and atheism as options for our beliefs (or absence thereof) in religion, but not a single one of us will seriously consider a belief in the gods of the Etruscans. It is, for us, a dead option.

To motivate this notion of live options, consider atheism, one of the options alive for us today. Not a single one of us today who considers ourselves as an atheist would have been had we been born in Italy in the 1400s.1 The reason is simple enough: today, we have the benefit of living after Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, the discovery of DNA and genetic science, the theory of the Big Bang. To hold to atheism today is easy enough because there is sufficient evidence to support a naturalistic worldview.

In Italy in the 1400s, however, to hold to atheism would have been to reject the entire body of available knowledge, often without much in the way of clear evidence that it was flawed. At the same time, we would have no replacement theories for many of the questions answered by that existing body of knowledge. With different data comes different answers, and the data that was used in the past was different to the data used today. Atheism, a dead (or not yet born) option in 1400s Italy, is today for many of us a live option.

It is not obvious, either, that the ways in which we choose between live options is particularly rational in the ways we like to imagine. In politics, we often accept as true the beliefs which most conform to our existing opinions. When confronted with evidence which forces us to change our beliefs, we often opt for the smallest possible change to the configuration of those beliefs to accommodate that evidence. The way in which we come to accept scientific facts outside of our domains of expertise as true differs from conspiracy theorists primarily in whom we choose to place our trust (albeit we can argue that our trust is better-placed). Our beliefs often reflect nothing more than our dispositions in interaction with our contexts.

Consequences

The fact of contingency, once accepted, raises several challenging and interrelated questions for us and our beliefs:

  1. Can we recover a notion of knowledge or truth which accepts the fact our beliefs are fallible and contingent?
  2. Are we forced to accept relativism–the idea that anything goes insofar as beliefs and practices are concerned–because what is rational or reasonable depends on contingent contexts?
  3. How should we relate to our own beliefs? Should we nonetheless hold them closely because to hold beliefs is so fundamental to the human experience? Hold them at a distance? Abandon holding any beliefs at all entirely?
  4. How do the sources of contingency differ in whether or how they undermine our beliefs?
  5. How do the consequences differ between empirical and non-empirical beliefs?

Read

Currently Reading

To Read

Footnotes

  1. This example is drawn from Palmer (2026), Chapter 54. ↩