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It is argued that Tarski's T-schema and the thesis of the necessity of identity cannot both be true.We show that the thesis of the necessity of identity 1 and Tarski's T-schema 2 cannot both be true.For, given the necessity of identity, it follows that: A: If Socrates = the teacher of Plato, then necessarily Socrates = the teacher of Plato.And hence, B: Necessarily Socrates = the teacher of Plato. But clearly.C: The statement 'Socrates = the teacher of Plato'. is not necessarily true.However, given Tarski's T-schema, (B) and (C) cannot both be true.1 Kripke (1971: 136-7), Kripke (1980: 3).2 Informally, Tarski's T-schema states that a statement is true if and only if what it states is the case. See Tarski (1949: 54-55).This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

We suggest that the classical version of the consequence argument contending that freedom and determinism are incompatible subtly misstates the core intuition, which is that if a true conditional and a true antecedent are jointly beyond our control, then so is the consequent. We show however that the improved version no less than the classical implies fatalism. Interestingly, the reasoning, that yields fatalism, undermines a direct argument for the soundness of the improved version. But if fatalism is sound, then trivially, so is the new version. We shall however argue that the new version cannot be sound. A weaker version is proved sound but its domain of application excludes the most intuitive paradigm cases. We share van Inwagen's thought that his “‘N’is a very interesting operator” and debate some of its features. Our results, if sound, suggest that the consequence argument in terms of ensurable and non‐ensurable truth may not be the right way to approach issues of determinism and freedom.