ABSTRACT
Things, in the wide sense, do not necessarily involve change. We can be good Platonists and confine our discourse to forms and numbers and other mathematical entities. But mathematical discourse is both limited and in a special sense otiose. Mathematical communications being in this sense otiose cannot contain, in a corresponding sense, anything new. Two hundred and fifty-seven can never cease to be a prime number. Communications that are not, in this extended sense, otiose, must convey propositions which are in some sense contingent. The negation of the proposition must have been not so obviously impossible that there was no point in ruling it out. And if, moreover, we are to regard the communication really as news, there is implicit the possibility of things being different now from what they may have been once.
