Anyone who denies reason severely undermines his own position--in fact he undermines every belief he has ever rationally ascertained. How can he know that his belief that reason doesn't exist apart from reason?

I also see no reason why anyone would entertain the idea of a brute fact. If our world was such that it didn't operate under PSR then we would expect a completely different world than we have today. The fact that everything we encounter has an explanation for its being is overwhelming evidence that perhaps there's an underlying principle that governs our world and imbues it with intelligibility. Also Feser has a retorsion argument to the effect that if we deny PSR then we deny any necessary connection between our coming to believe a given conclusion and its premises. We might believe things for no reason at all, and it might seem--again, for no reason at all--that we have good reasons for our beliefs. One can't claim that PSR is false but then go on to say it's only marginally false, and that perhaps only a few things are brute facts. Well how could he determine that? Brute facts don't follow objective tendencies, so one can't claim that there are brute facts but they're unlikely to occur. In short, Feser's argument is that is PSR is false then reason itself is common compromised--we would have to become radical skeptics, never knowing whether or not our beliefs are intelligible.

I have my own reserves about this argument though. It might rely on epistemic possibility. That is, it argues that because X (X being something that compromises our reason) might be the case, we should be radical skeptics concerning our cognitive faculties. But even in a PSR world it might be the case that we're brains in vats or being toyed around with by some Cartesian Demon--yet we don't think the mere possibility of this case entails radical skepticism concerning our cognitive faculties.

I'm still trying to work with Feser's argument. I've been discussing about it with others over at his blog.

Camoden wrote:

Hopefully one of these days I will feel comfortable enough to post my essay on Lagrange’s PNC based argument for the PSR. Unfortunately that is not now. I will say, the best PNC based argument for the PSR I have heard is from a manualist named Charles Hart. He states that since Being is intelligible can be proven by the law of identity, to deny intelligibility is an exclusive property of being is to say nothing is intelligible, which implicitly makes nothing have the same necessary property as being, clearly absurd. The reason he draws this from the PoI is because when the mind declares being is being, the is of predication reveals truth. In doing so, it declares it has the power to understand reality, claiming that something is, a judgement of truth. When we claim being is being, we say something that holds true for all beings, and to say something is unintelligible is simply to say it doesn’t exist, as truth is merely virtually distinct from being. Obviously this is reliant on Thomistic epistemology, but under this assumption it is manifest why the PSR is self evident and cannot be coherently denied. A collolary of this is if something isn’t intelligible of itself, it has to receive its intelligibility elsewhere. If it didn’t, it would simply be unintelligible. Since to all appearances the universe is existent, and yet seeming unintelligible of itself, it must be caused.

The supposition is that the Law of Identity cannot be coherently denied. This seems obvious.

In what work does Lagrange give his full argument?

Edit: Forgot to mention the obvious: all of this is concerning the possibility of brute facts in OP and subsequent posts addressing the issue.

I think Della Rocca's argument is a good one. 

​I also like Feser's argument that points out one cannot truly claim to have explained higher level features of reality by lower (or more fundamental) levels of reality if it bottoms out at some level that's just a brute fact, as doing so is like claiming to have explained the position of a book by reference to the position of a shelf, yet the position of the shelf in general is just a brute fact. In such attempts, where does the explicability of the higher level features of reality enter the picture? It cannot come from the brute fact itself, yet where else could it possibly come from? For some reason this argument doesn't seem to come up much, though Feser did mention it in one of his recent media interviews.

John Haldane also gives an argument in Atheism and Theism to the effect that PSR is a sort of first principle of rational inquiry, i.e. when we find something that isn't self-explanatory we seek external explanations, and we never seriously consider the notion that it has literally no explanation whatsoever. If we're going to abandon this first principle of rational inquiry, it seems we'd need some very good principled reason for doing so.

Haldane seems to take it this is sufficient to justify PSR unless and until someone can give reasons for rejecting it in specific cases, e.g. the cosmological argument, and so this perhaps serves as an effective means of shifting the burden of proof w.r.t. the truth of PSR. For what it's worth, out of all the philosophically sophisticated arguments I've seen given for PSR, I've probably had the most success in getting atheists to at least provisionally accept PSR using this kind of argument. I've found it to be an excellent sort of intuition pump.

Last edited by UGADawg (10/17/2017 9:46 pm)

UGAdawg,

Regarding Feser's argument from the hierarchical series of laws I think he was explicit in assuming an humean account of laws and so isn't as general as his retorsion argument  (if successful). For example, " I had argued that if we think of laws of nature as regularities, then no appeal to such laws can explain anything if the most fundamental such laws are regarded as inexplicable “brute facts.”  Oerter writes:


To change the example, consider: “The cause of the forest fire was the lightning that hit that tree.”

Suppose the lightning was a brute fact (a bolt out of a clear blue sky, as it were). How does its brute-fact-ness in any way decrease its explanatory power? It's still the cause of the forest fire, isn't it?


End quote.  Now, let me first reiterate that my remarks in the earlier post were about, specifically, laws of nature understood as regularities.  Even if Oerter’s example were a case of a brute fact serving as a genuine explanation, that wouldn’t affect the point that laws understood as regularities wouldn’t be true explanations if the fundamental level of laws were a brute fact.  (And Oerter may well agree with that much, for all I know.)".

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/can-you-explain-something-by-appealing.html?m=1

I'm playing with the idea that accepting that maths provides neccessary truths and Aristotelian realism about universals entails the PSR. For mathematical truths would have to be grounded in either the physical world or minds on Aristotelian realism and, assuming some mathematical propositions are neccessary propositions, whichever option is chosen will have to be itself neccessary. (In order to get to theism I would go from PSR to PPC and utilise Ross' immateriality argument to show that the neccessary being must possess intellect).

Also, I think I'm starting to see why Feser and Nancy Cartwright make such a big deal about laws of nature. Feser's PSR argument seems to give the atheist two options if they take the Humean/regularity option. Either nothing has an explanation or everything does. Platonic theories don't help either. Platonic accounts of laws are supposed to be more fundamental than the material world, but platonic laws cannot be the terminus of explanation (the typical issues with platonism). You don't even need PSR on this account. It already rules the material worls out as terminus of explanation and it points to something beyond itself as the next link in the chain.

I think the athiest's best bet is to punt for Aristotelian account of laws. This seems to push Aristotelian realism on the athiest, however.

Thank you all for your answers.

As far as I'm aware, I thought that God is a brute fact (since there is no explanation for His existence).

My doubts come from reading Democritus (on the topic of finality), and Dennett (for the existence of the self). I can safely deduce the existence of a Prime Being (whether a sea of possibilities or an uncaused cause), but I have doubts moving towards intelligence.

Indeed, my initial objection reduces to blind pantheism : there is nothing but things imploding into being for no reason. I know that it is absurd, but I never understood why something absurd cannot be, unless we suppose being to be rational.