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Aristotle held that all empirical knowledge was contingent, i.e., non- necessary, as did Aquinas after him.?I?don't remember where each said it, nor where they defended the view. (Prior Analytics?) It is something of a problem in Aristotle because his classic definition of "science" is "ordered, universal, necessary knowledge of the causes of things".?So if empirical knowledge is contingent, thenempirical science must be impossible. Contemporary philosophy of science seems to agree.?See its view of science as always revisable.?This leaves math and logic and metaphysics as the only sciences in Aristotle's classic sense. What Piaget has to say about the understanding of parts and wholes might be interesting to pursue inso far as propositions such as "a thing cannot be more than itself" is in fact a necessary metaphysical one. (By the way, for those who haver heard, there is a relatively new alternative logic to set theory about parts and wholes, called "mereology".) There is also the intriguing propsition of Augustine "a thing cannot be black and white all over" which is echoed by Wittgenstein's "a? thing cannot be red and green all over".?Is that an empirical truth?? We get "red" and "green" only from sensory experience, yet it is a necessary truth.?I see it as an instantiationI of the metaphysical truth?"a thing cannot be other than itself".