Principle of Sufficient Reason
plato.stanford.edu
plato.stanford.edu
The Principle of Sufficient Reason:
Every fact can be explained in terms of some other facts.
Call those other facts the sufficient reasons for said fact.
No fact is ever explained in terms of itself. That is,
if you repeatedly take the "sufficient reasons" for a fact,
you never get back to the original fact.
There is no infinite chain of (distinct) sufficient reasons.
That is, there is no infinite sequence F1, F2, F3, ... such
that "F2 is one of the sufficient reasons for F1", "F3 is one
of the sufficient reasons for F2", etc.
For those who believe the PSR: which do you give up? Are you ok with cycles, or with infinite regress?
These axioms might for the basis of all others, they cannot be explained though, they are inherent. Why can only one thing be True, for example (single objective reality). What does 'one' mean in this context? etcetcetc
Interesting events outside of abstract, simplified, theoretical scenarios normally have multiple probabilistic causes, and while the causes could be analyzed at multiple levels - atomic, mechanical, emotional, symbolic - only the atomic is real. The others are complex webs of stories we tell ourselves, stories using symbols that hide details because we cannot understand the world as it is, we can only cope with it in a simplified form. Only as a story.
Our choice of symbols and abstraction level to tell our story creates artificial entities and forces to explain things. But the boundaries of these entities are a fiction. The world has no ontology; it's a giant bucket of interacting particles. The problem with getting serious with this kind of a principle is that it will break down. When you try and zoom in on the referents of the symbols, you'll find that they're a lot blurrier than your stories told you.
What does "real" mean here? I'm using it as a proxy for truth, or perhaps better, accuracy in a model. That is, if a model of the world makes predictions about the world, the model is "real" to the degree that the predictions are correct. But all human models of the world have their limits, usually forced by our tiny little brains and meagre data input senses.
We take something that we've decided to categorize, and create symbols to represent commonalities, and theorize relations between the symbols, and test these theories, and gradually refine a calculus of symbols that we can use to apply to the world, and the system works, in so far as the commonalities stay common, and the symbols aim squarely at the average of the referents. But it's not reality; it's all made up, like mathematics. It's just a story, it's all in our heads and in narratives we communicate with one another. The symbols don't stick; the world moves on. People change; humans are animals that evolve over time, and continue to evolve. We can't even decide what a human is - the evergreen abortion debate - and other fictions like races, species and planets etc. shift as we change our mind.
So when you want to get serious about causes, you're going to be using a system. You're going to be using symbols and relations between symbols; you're going to define your symbols in terms of commonalities between events and matter that appear to repeat reliably. But it only works because we have so little thinking matter, so little data, so little input; it's the only way we can squeeze the enormity of the world into our tiny heads.
The real problem comes down to what we mean by "truth". Truth can't simply be the accuracy of our models of the material world, because the material world can't tell us anything about how we should act.
It's a mistake to assume that anything that can be analyzed in terms of smaller pieces is less real than the pieces. Neither is real, or both are.
I think your dichotomy is false. Human simplifications of the world are "real" in so far as they correspond with what they model (or else we'll get into a debate about what "real" means). The higher up in the abstraction stack you go, the bigger things (generally) you can model, but the details vary more. This may be more "real", or less "real", depending on what you're trying to model and how well the conceptual framework fits; e.g. you won't get far with modelling fluid as Newtonian marbles. The point being that it's not a binary proposition, the models are all approximations, and any "cause" you find is only with respect to a story people have made up about the way the world works.
1) The PSR is typically defended empirically. That is, the reason for believing in the PSR is usually some form of "we observe that things happen for reasons."
2) No process is ever provided for determining whether or not a particular reason is actually sufficient.
Taken together, 2) says that we have no justification for believing that any of the reasons we observe in 1) are actually evidence for the universality of sufficient reasons posited in the PSR.
Certain shapes and patterns of particles become larger and larger semantic entities. Particle patterns that repeat or recur become self-referential and correlated. With systems that are complex, chaotic and highly sensitive to initial conditions -- there is no "reason" or the "reason" can be everything -- there is no separability of part from whole.
The article itself has a rather flowery style, but there's a summary of the main argument and discussion of it here: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/della-rocca-on-psr...
For me, with admittedly less than expert understanding of philosophical terminology and methodology, the obvious criticism of infinite regress is not sufficiently addressed.
It comes down to, yes infinity (or any permutation (or DAG) of the universe of facts) for some facts. And yes that is not very satisfying. - But I think any techniques of cutting the chain at some point is arbitrary to some degree and not rigorous as an exploration of the problem.
I have adapted an ad-hoc set of primitives that I grounded on like five years ago. I call these the principles of context. They're hard to write about, believe me I've tried, but I've come to believe that any logical position can be analyzed and represented using contextual verses.
I've identified six of them, topic, inverse, converse, reverse, obverse, whole. I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest. Any idea / position can be related to any other idea by passing them through intermediary ideas in these contextual verses. This is mostly what we do when we think.
The PSR in this sense encapsulates the idea that there is no true discontinuities in the world, only mental blocks we impose upon ourselves.
You solve the infinity problem simply by making infinity an idea that can be reached or gone through contextually. Regression itself can be seen as operating on the inverse of a particular idea.
As someone who asked "why?" all the time as a kid, I'd love to read your elaboration.
This is where you need an organizing concept. I call this the whole. The whole is the topic plus the inverse of the topic. So if you're using the whole of all nations, you might say that the inverse of the United States is all the other countries of the world that aren't the US.
Next step is the reverse context. The United States is a country, so the reverse would be everything that is not a country. As you can imagine that's a very big space.
We now reach the converse. The converse is the part of the reverse that is the counterpart of the topic. To find the converse is the whole point of doing this kind of logic, and it requires some location.
The part of the reverse that isn't the converse is called the obverse. So to understand what the converse of the United States is, find the United States-shaped hole in the the rest of the universe that isn't the United States. A good approach is to take the inverse of the United States and use it to "cast a shadow" on the reverse. This highlights the converse.
Note that I used the word "universe" just now. It turns out that there's just no good word for the combination of the whole of a topic and it's reverse. Any word you use is going to constitute some kind of limitation on what it is. If you're spiritually-minded, though, it maps perfectly onto concepts like God, or the Source. In fact, I developed this whole scheme in order to better understand spiritual topics like what does it mean to be non-physical.
Locating a thing's converse isn't easy and it requires delving into a lot of things that might seemingly have no relation to the topic, but will if you keep applying context logic to them. I'm going to just jump through the intermediary contexts to arrive at what the converse of the United States is. Not that it wouldn't be interesting but it just takes a lot of work to articulate. I told you this was hard to write about.
In the beginning we assigned the inverse of the US to the other states of the nation, but that's not really the case. The real inverse is the people. The inverse of America is Americans. People have agency. Agency means you can change yourself to become something you're not. But you're not just changing randomly, you're directing it. The United States, being a collection of people, has agency of its own. Agency charts a path through the reverse, that path is the converse.
It all seems a bit boring, but this sort of analysis is extremely useful for making sense of spirituality. What does it mean for something to be real? What are verses of reality? I can sit here and tell you what it is, but it's better to do the analysis yourself and have insights yourself. It's essentially a way to explore the world of ideas in a rigorous fashion.
For example you use the U.S. and, sure, it can be useful to think of every country that isn't the U.S. So if someone says "C++" it can be useful to think of every computer language that isn't C++.
But the rest of your "-verses" didn't give me any reason to think of them in the future.
Can you give a few more real-world examples and the insight you gained? Why is this useful?
You can work out all manner of insights about a film this way. Works well with comic fandoms, legal concepts, anywhere where there's significant amounts of hidden context to uncover, you can use context logic to quickly sketch out an outline of how it all hangs together, and fit all the information you read into fleshing out that model.
I noticed the human mind doesn't tend to be able to work consciously with inverse / obverse. For example, humor tends to leave the scene when you start analyzing a joke. I call these "core" contexts. A lot of insights can be mined out of what you're not seeing. If the inverse is hard to find, maybe it's like that for a reason.
Look, as far as I can tell these terms are your own. If you could, would you please give more, illustrative, examples - I know it's hard to do. Like, with your film example.
I'm not looking for a list of domains like "comic fandoms, legal concepts, anywhere where there's significant amounts of hidden context to uncover". This is just a list of all sorts of things.
I would request for you to please walk through exact explicit examples of each of your "-verses". Make an example up and show me the insight. Be super explicit with a specific real example, if you can.
I am on board, due to the example you just gave with "reverse" and films -- meaning, "everything else the filmmaker could have put there." So I'm on board and you have my interest and attention.
Meticulously walk through the other "-verses", while staying with real, specific examples. Try to work hard to make a genuine example that grants insight. I'm sorry to make this request (I'm on board with everything you've written), but I find your abstract definitions too hard to follow. Instead of a single example (like the United States), if you would give specific examples that really give insight (as you did with film above) it would be helpful. Thank you.
I'll tell you what. I've been thinking of doing a context-logic wiki, but just haven't found the right time to get started on it. I think a good entry point would be an email thread. Why don't you shoot me an email and I'll try to give you what you want. You can find my email in my profile.
That goes for anyone else following that wants more of this.
This might be of interest: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/concepts.html
identification taxonomy discovery location cultivation collection curation meditation organization workflow analytics design management systems mapping maintenance encapsulation problem-solving incident-clearing derisking
These are all approaches for working with discrete ideas. The thing about context logic is that it's exceedingly and annoyingly heavy. Once you get the hang of it the mind naturally just wants to push the logic to the periphery and go back to doing things the way it used to. If I'm looking to work with an idea, I might look at that list of verbs and ask myself, "what does this idea need?"
There's a converse here of concepts:
philosophy research intelligence marketing sales diplomacy finance development engineering operations health service legal political public-relations celebrity monetary economics business branding creative
At first I was just writing these concepts down, collecting, then suddenly I realized I needed cultivation. So I started just moving them around. Eventually I realized that the former were individual approaches for dealing with ideas and context, while the latter were collective approaches.
Couldn't it just as well be fluffy cats, Saharan sand or an Aztec deity?
In fact I came to the realization last night after I worked on that comment, that searching for a thing's converse only really makes sense when the thing has some form of agency. You could perhaps consider the inverse to be "ideas" as America is an idea. You might consider all the different ideas that constitute America, such as individual freedom, meritocracy over hierarchy.
Where you get when you go down this road enough times with enough topics, as I did, is that the alternative considerations all belong in the topic's inverse. You get a deep sense for the dividing lines between contexts. Contextual spaces are vast. Perhaps you can find some old apocrypha tying America to an Aztec deity, say Jefferson wrote a reference to one in some legal opinion or whatnot.
That would be enough to put Aztec deities into America's inverse. But it wouldn't be very relevant. As I kept working with this, I realized that you need a sense of importance. You're driving towards an insight, and every insight is additive. What you're looking for is classes of things. The history of America, the culture of America, everything you can think about that America is, goes in the inverse.
All that combined make up the whole.
let the topic = x
let the whole (the organising concept) = T
x is related to T thus, x:T, : changes depending on the organising relation
inverse topic is T-x
so T = x + T-x is what you have stated.
George Boole, Lincoln, 1847, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, being an Essay towards a Calculus of Deductive Reasoning http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36884/36884-pdf.pdf See the Table on page 25
the reverse appears to me to be T′, as you say, that's a very big space
it's unclear to me what you intend by the converse. you say that it is located within T′, let's call it x′ (pronounced x prime).
following on from that the obverse appears to be T′-x′.
the whole of the topic (T) and its reverse (T′) could be 1 using this notation, and this notation is fairly standard.
Boole called the conceptual space we're trying to pin down the “domain of discourse”, this is fairly standard terminology.
> Note that I used the word "universe" just now. It turns out that there's just no good word for the combination of the whole of a topic and it's reverse.
In that case I don't think you should use the word universe for that designation. Maybe just use domain of discourse? However, be aware that there is a precedent for the use of the word universe: https://ncatlab.org/homotopytypetheory/show/universe
> kind of logic
To my mind what you are doing is not logic per se but analysis. Specifically a narrow kind of conceptual analysis https://philpapers.org/browse/conceptual-analysis Though if pressed I would not quibble with you calling what you are doing a kind of logic. Again, there is a precedent for this.
I'm kind of intrigued as to what you're getting with the notion of a converse. Maybe give a concrete example? From there it should be obvious what is meant by the obverse.
Previous times I've tried to articulate these concepts to an audience I've gotten no bites. What I'd really like one day is to sit down with someone who does work in theoretical philosophy and articulate my views over the course of a few weeks / months. I see that as about as likely as Donald Trump actually being a good president.
In the meantime I satisfy myself with iterating and refining my beliefs by myself.
So "spoon's" converse are forks, knives, maybe chopsticks, etc.
In reality, it seems to me that if you want to develop a system of understanding you have to develop a set of axioms and accept them. And by Goedel's incompleteness theorem, your system cannot be a complete or exhaustive description of what is true.
If you mean that there are arguments against the Aristotelean concept of an unmoved mover, that is certainly so.
But typically the term "discredited" implies a broad public consensus, whereas many people accept some form of the cosmological argument, which is related to the concept of an unmoved mover.
To use your version of "discredited," we might say that both theism and atheism are discredited, merely because there are arguments against each.
2: lots of humans don't believe X
Maybe there is a third kind of "discredited."
That's not really the case with the cosmological argument, or with the (similar but not identical) argument given by Aristotle for an unmoved mover.
2) Few philosophers are experts in the cosmological argument anyway, so it doesn't matter what most philosophers think of it.
If "everything in existence depends on something else" is a valid generalization, introducing an entity with out such dependencies is a cobtradiction.
OTOH, if it's not a valid generalization, any number of things in existence could lack such a dependency, and there is no need to assume a unique and special unobserved entity with no dependencies.
An independent common first cause or unmoved mover is, perhaps, an aesthetically pleasing (for some) solution to the apparent problem that things generally seem to have causes but infinite regress is an unappealing belief. But it is neither logically necessary, nor does any first cause necessary resemble God (the Big Bang works fine as an uncaused cause on which all other events in the universe depends, and isn't anything like any traditional concept of God, as, more generally, does any initial state inferred from modern observations of physics.)
Sure, but Aristotle, Aquinas and Leibniz did not this that this was a valid generalization.
>the Big Bang works fine as an uncaused cause on which all other events in the universe depends
It would not work fine as an uncaused cause, since it is not purely actual.
Also, it's worth noting that the unmoved mover argument doesn't actually make any reference to the universe as such. It starts with any given instance of motion and then argues that this motion must ultimately have originated from an unmoved mover. Neither the universe nor its beginning in time is ever mentioned. (And in fact Aristotle thought that the universe was past eternal, and Aquinas was neutral on that issue.)
Well, that's still right, whether there are same-ish fundamental particles or not.
Just a pair of particles being the same in all their aspects doesn't make them identical. For example they don't occupy the same place in space.
Of course there are not two identical things in the universe. Because being identical they're the same thing, aren't they? It's called the identity of indiscernibles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_of_indiscernibles
And one may disagree with the "unmoved mover" (let's call it an) axiom but if one takes that as given then it is plain to see that Leibniz's argument holds. And say you actually do disagree with it as an axiom then you have a bigger problem, what Umberto Eco called the most intractable problem of all, the problem that generates all other problems, namely, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
Logic, science and philosophy (and Leibniz did all three) doesn't concern itself with the "common understandings of the world".
In the Leibniz's example, he wanted to set first principles -- that go deeper than the "common understanding".
Eliezer Yudkowsky has made an argument against doing epistemology by intuition [1]. Famously, Henri Bergson tried to use his intuition about time to dismiss special relativity, and while he may have swayed the Nobel prize committee [2], his ideas were swept away by history.
Turning now to your last paragraph, it is like saying Bernie Madoff's clients were wealthy because the arithmetic in their statements was correct. Also, one cannot validly argue against the rejection of a self-serving axiom on the grounds that doing so leaves problems unsolved.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/q1/bells_theorem_no_epr_reality/
[2] http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/this-philosopher-helped...
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ph/can_you_prove_two_particles_are_i...
Just a pair of particles being the same in all their aspects doesn't make them identical. For example they don't occupy the same place in space.
From the accepted answer:
That's what a Bose-Einstein condensate is: lots of bosons in the same place and quantum state.
Now you might accept this example but say that the PSR doesn't apply to "everyday" facts like the one in the example but only at some more fundamental level of description. There is, perhaps, some precise configuration of fundamental particles that is the microphysical basis of the fact that we met in Japan, and is natural to explain the existence of that precise configuration of particles in terms of its causal antecedents -- the precise configurations of particles that existed earlier. If you simply accept determinism, as most Enlightenment philosophers did, you get a kind of PSR at this level. But of course there is a regress lurking here since you can try to follow the causes back to the beginning (and you can also get a problem about PSR by asking about the reason for the laws themselves that govern the causal relationships). At this "cosmological" level, most philosophers would probably accept something like brute facts, but there is undeniably something very offensive about this idea, and I guess a reason why Leibniz is interesting is that he really resisted it.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/...
Philosopher Colin McGinn argues that our brains were designed for dealing with practical matter in living, and so some things, like the mind-body problem are simply beyond our understanding.
https://www.amazon.com/Leibniz-Very-Short-Introduction-Intro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_th...
No matter how we choose to model the world, there will always be statements in our models for which we won't be able to find or discover a sufficient reason.