Book Club: Scientific Metaphysics, 4, A bestiary of the manifest image
I occasionally like playing chess. I’m not that good at it, and I tend to do it only to pass the time on long transatlantic flights. But I know the rules and even some basic elements of strategy. I didn’t know, until recently, that someone has demonstrated that you cannot checkmate your opponent’s king when only their king and your king and knight are on the board. It’s one of many theorems about chess that have been discovered and logically proven. Cool, because it means that there are universal truths about an invented game. (I assume you aren’t a Platonist about chess.)
There are also meta-truths of chess. For instance, “you can never checkmate with a lone knight and king” is not a truth of chess, but the fact that that statement is not true is a meta-truth, that is, a higher order truth, in chess.
These two examples are found at the beginning of Daniel Dennett’s chapter in Ladyman, Ross, and Kincaid’s Scientific Metaphysics, which I have been sampling as a way to more or less systematically explore an alternative approach to standard analytic metaphysics. (See parts one, two, and three of this series.)
Why on earth is Dennett talking about chess truths and meta-truths? Because he then introduces his famous notion of “chmess.” You see, chmess is just like chess, except…
