One could also argue from a very limited principle: anything that *can* have an explanation actually has an explanation. This avoids problems with BCCF, for example.

But then what about the existence of contingent things? What about the question "why do things exist?"? If it can have an explanation, then it has such an explanation. But that implies PSR is true, at least a PSR for contingent things.

I'm not that obsessed with PSR. It may very well be that everything has an explanation, but this does not mean that we are going to find it. Still, the rational way of going about things is with explanations. This is my PSR.

Miguel wrote:

Thread dedicated to discussing our favorite obsession. Share arguments and thoughts.

One of the interesting things I noticed is that we tend to use explicability arguments for existence as well as explicability arguments for other things.

How? Imagine you created 2 small rooms that are completely empty, and you isolated both rooms from any and all possible external causal and explanatory influences that could generate any new objects or disturbances within them. And let's say you also removed any and all possible causal and explanatory influences inside the rooms as well, such that you are guaranteed to have the rooms be simple rooms where nothing happens inside of them.

Let's say you close yourself up in room 1 for five minutes. Nothing happens.

Now close yourself up in room 2 for five minutes. You would expect nothing to happen, no bricks materialising above your head, no strange sounds appearing for no reason, no interferences whatsoever. 

Yet this is an explicability argument that rules out objects starting to exist / just appearing for no reason and interfering with your experiment. What this entails is that we already accept explicability arguments for the existence of things, and as such the contingency argument goes through on that intuition.


2) Another interesting thing I noticed is that in all explicability arguments, the thing that is problematic is the inexplicability / bruteness of the things that are rejected. 

It's not that an Archimedian scale cannot fail to balance if equal weights are on it (since it surely can fail to balance if a certain object were causing the other scale to stay up, if the screws on the second part of the scale aren't properly attached and are preventing the second scale from working, etc.), and it's not that a dissolvable tablet cannot possibly fail to dissolve in the water (since there can be causal / explanatory influences that can cause that to happen), it's that these things cannot happen because they do so  inexplicably.

It's the inexplicability that's the problem, not the events that happen. So explicability arguments are arguments that generally go against inexplicability / bruteness  as such, rather than being merely localised in a given particular case. The same applies to the existence of things. So it seems that the very absurdity of inexplicability is something that universalises on all domains, not just on local cases as presented by Della Rocca.

I am pretty sure that if you were to ask an average non-theist on the street, say an agnostic that isn't hostile to religion and just doesn't care much either way and also doesn't know much about the various arguments pro and con either, he would pretty much reject the idea that something can start existing inexplicably as much as he would reject the idea of a dissolvable tablet failing to dissolve inexplicably. 

The issue would be the inexplicability, no matter what area it happens to allegedly be in.

Miguel wrote:

What do you think of using Pruss's Weak Weak Principle of Sufficient Reason as an argument for PSR?

I am a bit skeptical with regards to Pruss's arguments for God on the basis of the sheer possibility of principles that imply God's existence. They remind me a little bit too much of the ontological argument and it's attempt to prove that God exists from the sheer possibility of a necessary maximally great being existing.

I guess I just don't see how the sheer possibility of a necessary being existing can somehow be modally manipulated to entail that the possible necessary being is an actual necessary being by the sheer possibility of it's own necessity.

In the same way, I don't see how the sheer possibility of the existence of things having an explanation and there possibly being a necessary being that explains existence somehow entails that there really is an actually existing necessary being from the sheer possibility of it.

Last edited by aftermathemat (5/08/2018 7:39 am)

But we don't even need S5. Though I have no problems at all with S5 (it's quite obvious to me that if a necessary being possibly exists then it does in fact exist; to me the problem with OA is arguing for the first premiss specifically, but it can be good to combine with cosmological args like those), the thing is that WPSR entails PSR and you don't even need S5 to do so.

I don't think you are correct in saying PSR would not be ontologically possible because it's necessary. Every necessary fact or object that is actually the case is by definition possible. An actual necessary being would exist in every possible world, but obviously would also exist in at least one possible world, satisfying the definition. If PSR is true then it is obviously also possible, and ontologically so, because if it were not possible ontologically then it wouldn't be actual at all. Possibility here need not imply potentiality as in the A-T framework. (If however one insists on ground alethic modality in aristotelian powers etc, then we could run Pruss's argument for PSR from that theory)

Regardless, we can use epistemic possibility as a guide to ontology, and we generally do so. It can be defeasible and need not be failproof, but the idea is that if we can at least conceive of something being the case, then we have some reason to regard it as possible. (But it's defeasible. The problem with Hume's argument, in my view, is that we can't really conceive what he's asking us to conceive - cf. Anscombe - and still that wouldn't be enough to deal away with reasons we can have for holding PSR - self-evidence, inductive generalization, the fact that there is no arbitrary chaos happening right now, etc)

So if WPSR is possibly true, which to me seems self-evident and very hard to deny, it would be possible that every contingent fact could at least have an explanation even if it were not the case that every cf actually had an explanation. But that entails the actual PSR. I don't see how it would be reasonable to reject WWPSR.

Last edited by Miguel (5/08/2018 11:35 am)

Miguel wrote:

 Every necessary fact or object that is actually the case is by definition possible. An actual necessary being would exist in every possible world, but obviously would also exist in at least one possible world, satisfying the definition.

I think I would have to disagree with that. Necessary facts aren't  "possible",  if by that one means they are like abstract possibilities and contingent beings. Necessary facts come prior to and before contingent facts, and they actually tell us what is possible and what is not possible, since they are grounded in the Divine Nature, and as such are logically prior to abstract possibilities.