The Possibility of Impossibility

I’m sure many of us have heard the term “nothing is impossible” be thrown around
before. Well, there’s several theories that posit the “nothing is impossible” claim or at least they
posit something similar to it. For instance, possibilism and modal realism both suggest that
anything will necessarily possess the theoretical potential to be true and real. Modal realism
argues that accepting the reality of possibilities has certain benefits as a useful, although
somewhat provisional, framework of belief, whereas possibilism argues that somethings are
merely possible while not existing in the same respect as an actual or real being. Additionally,
trivialism is the position that everything is not only possible but is actually true. Contradictions
are also considered to be true in trivialism.
While it’s often automatically assumed that trivialism is incorrect, Paul Kabay wrote a
defense of trivialism as a sort of prodding into the inadequacies of our assumptions about
contradictions and impossibilities. He argues that if possibilism is true (i.e. if everything is at
least a possibility), then there should be a possible world where trivialism is true. In the possible
world where trivialism is true, it would be true that it was the same as the actual world (i.e. it
would be true that it would be real), since trivialism makes all statements real. Thus, the
existence of trivialism as a possibility would entail its existence in reality.
It’s fair to ask if possibilism specifically and necessarily requires all things to
possibilities, but if it doesn’t, then the statement “nothing is impossible” would be proven false,
since trivialism and the possibility of trivialism would be impossible. Conversely, if trivialism is
possible, then it would also be true that something is impossible, since all statements are true
under trivialism including the statement “something is impossible.”
Thus, we could conclude that something must be impossible. If trivialism is not possible,
then it is true that something is impossible and if trivialism is possible, then trivialism itself
would violate the “nothing is impossible” claim. To simplify the argument, one could argue that
if nothing is impossible then something impossible would itself be impossible. We can then
conclude that there must be some object, statement, etc. that is theoretically impossible.
Why does this matter? Firstly, it gives us an unreasonably pedantic way of shutting down
people who arbitrarily throw out grand statements like “nothing is impossible,” which is always
a good deal of fun. More importantly, it presents us with a new insight of what’s real, namely the
existence of impossibilities. The falsifiability of the statement “nothing is impossible” would
suggest that either a real thing must be impossible or at least something must be theoretically
impossible. Of course, the very definition of impossibility would likely imply that a real thing
could not be impossible, but then a theoretical impossibility must exist. Therefore, the statement
“nothing is impossible” may lead us to conclude that a theoretically thing must still exist (since
an impossibility must exist), albeit in a different manner than a regular object like an apple.