i earnestly recommend amy karofsky's book 'a case for necessitarianism'. it's an extremely well-written explication of necessitarianism and a refutation of contingentarianism. she doesn't reject the PSR, but it's not necessary for necessitarianism.
"It would be surprising to find that millenniums of human advancement and understanding of the physical world would end in the conclusion that everything is just brute and random and that all of our supposed "explanations" were pure, fortunate, accidents."
and
"Otherwise, science wouldn't be worth doing, as it's futile to search for underlying explanations of the world when those explanations aren't actually there."
seem to misunderstand randomness and/or an acausal humean mosaic. if in fact existence is random or necessitarianism is the case, i.e. stuff just happens, nothing can be in any way otherwise than it in fact is, it doesn't mean that there ever were accidents or fortunate occurrences or that experiences of surprisal against mistaken assumptions of contingency (possibility for things to be otherwise in some way) make sense.
similarly, appraisals like 'otherwise, science wouldn't be worth doing' if determinism or necessitarianism is true get randomness wrong. it's similar to saying that change is impossible if determinism is true, or that x will happen anyway, even if i'm not doing x. these are just confused. randomness can be *any pattern*. that's the mindfuck! randomness doesn't at all require culturally variable notions of weird or unexpected or outright bizarre occurrences. such a humean mosaic where the states of affairs occur randomly can be patterned in any way, eg. ways that hordes of causality simps would swear that such ways must feature causality, too!!!
as for the ineliminability of a principle or a concept, i'm extremely suspicious about boiling everything inferential/conjectural/vibes/hunches/guesses down to 'reasons' and immunizing the PSR that way. for me, epistemic ineliminables are more basic stuff like 'something exists', nothing complex like the PSR.
“seem to misunderstand randomness and/or an acausal humean mosaic.”
I intend to show that the truth isn’t random, that there are no brute facts in principle, but what appears to be random/acausal are only gaps in our understanding. Randomness cannot truly exist in nature, but represents the limits of our sense making abilities. Stay tuned on how truth relates to reasons (and can’t be independent of reasons), proving the PSR.
"Deniers of the PSRs resemble so-called "global skeptics," who may say that they doubt their knowledge on paper—however, if you were to examine their lives, you'd see they, too, operate under the assumption of having (or not having) knowledge—no different than anyone else. They will never say as much, which is why actions count more than words."
This reminds me of mystics who claim "all is one and there is no difference between anything" or the sophists who claim "we cannot know anything really exists or is causal", yet will always act in the world with the expectation of consistency and differentiation. They know to turn on the same light using the same switch each time, and that their keys must have been misplaced rather than been stolen by a goblin.
and all this doesn't matter for the skeptical point. tell me the ways of distinguishing between a reality with causality and one without, but that is such that the states of affairs are distinguishable, non-static, patterned. that you point to particular behaviors doesn't get you one inch closer to a skepticism defeating method of inquiry; it's all just appealing to incredulity. you can view skeptical stances as trivial, outrageous, ridiculous, but you can't eliminate them.
I’m glad you brought up the skeptical challenge. The philosophy I lay out is immune to skepticism.
I side with the skeptics on the uncertainty of the external world, but the skeptic can never deny the existence of “reasons” as I have defined them. For if they do, then their skepticism couldn’t itself be justified, and their criticism becomes self-defeating (“if no one has any reasons, then the skeptic has no reason for their skepticism and my view od reasons stand”). I will dedicate an article fleshing out this argument in greater detail, so stay tuned.
“all contingent facts have reasons for their existence. For every contingent fact ("X"), there is a sufficient condition ("Y").”
This formulation of the PSR is all fine and good, but it notably leaves necessary truths ‘off the table’ so to speak. That being the case it’s hard to see why providing arguments against this formulation of the PSR would assume it’s truth or falsity, since the PSR, if true, is true necessarily.
Further it’s open to the denier of the standard PSR to adopt heavily weakened versions (all things probably have explanations, we should assume things have explanations unless given justification to the contrary, all things in the observable universe have explanations, etc.) All of those weakened principles are going to be compatible with daily invocations of reason, scientific practice, and so on, but will leave the proponent of the weakened principles able to say, for instance, that the existence of the universe is a brute fact.
In connection with my original point, any principle that amounts to ‘we should have justifications for all our beliefs’ is going to be compatible with asking for justification of the PSR, but won’t entail the PSR. So all someone needs is to accept a principle along those lines and they can question the PSR without accepting it, and if that’s true then the questioning the PSR isn’t inherently self defeating. “But if a fact is brute how can you have a justified belief in that fact?” Because you can have reasons for thinking that fact *is brute*.
Thanks for the comment! The nature of necessary truths will be discussed later, but I’d rather have this version of the PSR (only with respect for contingent truths) for clarify.
By grounding truth claims on reasons, we accept the PSR, and by demanding reasons for the PSR, we implicitly accept it. Otherwise, our demand for reasons would be ungrounded. If questioning the PSR didnt also imply the PSR, then questioning would be arbitrary.
Why do you doubt the PSR and what use are reasons to resolve that doubt? This can only be answered by accepting the PSR.
Why only argue for the weakened PSR when the stronger one works fine and plays an even stronger grounding role?
> By grounding truth claims on reasons, we accept the PSR, and by demanding reasons for the PSR, we implicitly accept it. Otherwise, our demand for reasons would be ungrounded. If questioning the PSR didnt also imply the PSR, then questioning would be arbitrary.
This is precisely what's in question! I bring up weakened PSRs because even if it's true that reasoning presumes some PSR or other, its not at all clear that it requires your strong version. But the other point I'm making is that your formulation of the PSR concerns only contingent facts. The PSR, if true, is true necessarily and not contingently. Given that, it's not clear how arguing against the PSR assumes the PSR, when the PSR isn't within it's own purview so to speak.
> Why do you doubt the PSR and what use are reasons to resolve that doubt?'
Because I think the strong PSR entails necessitarianism, for roughly van inwagen style reasons.
> Why only argue for the weakened PSR when the stronger one works fine and plays an even stronger grounding role?
>This is precisely what's in question! I bring up weakened PSRs because even if it's true that reasoning presumes some PSR or other, its not at all clear that it requires your strong version. But the other point I'm making is that your formulation of the PSR concerns only contingent facts.
No one is required to take the stronger version, but the stronger version is equally compatible with reasoning. Why take the weaker version when the stronger one is just as available?
>The PSR, if true, is true necessarily and not contingently. Given that, it's not clear how arguing against the PSR assumes the PSR, when the PSR isn't within it's own purview so to speak.
If you treat the PSR as a truth which may or may not be true (contingently true) by demanding proof for it, you are assuming the PSR’s truth necessarily. This is why criticism of the PSR is self-defeating, by treating it as a contingent truth, we take it is a necessarily truth. And which is why the PSR can’t be a contingent truth, for treating it as such is self undermining. This is further proof of it being necessary.
I think you should take a weakened version (if you take one at all) because the strong version entails necessitarianism, as I mentioned above. Re: your other comment about contingentarianism, I don't quite know what you mean by that, but as far as I can tell it's an entailment from the PSR (and my understanding reasons as entailing) that the strong PSR entails necessitarianism. It doesn't involve any other commitments of mine.
> If you treat the PSR as a truth which may or may not be true (contingently true) by demanding proof for it, you are assuming the PSR’s truth necessarily. This is why criticism of the PSR is self-defeating, by treating it as a contingent truth, we take it is a necessarily truth. And which is why the PSR can’t be a contingent truth, for treating it as such is self undermining. This is further proof of it being necessary.
Demanding proof for P doesn't entail that P is contingent. If I ask for a proof of Goldbach's conjecture, I am not thereby supposing Goldbach's conjecture is contingent. Also, a principle like "we generally need to provide reasons for things" or "all else equal, things tend to have reasons" will do just as well to sanction my request for a justification of the PSR. The Strong PSR quite obviously isn't the only game in town for justifying requests for reasons, and weakened versions which are compatible with bruteness can just as well ground asking for reasons for the PSR.
>Demanding proof for P doesn't entail that P is contingent. If I ask for a proof of Goldbach's conjecture, I am not thereby supposing Goldbach's conjecture is contingent.
Yea, this is true except for reasoning itself. By grounding truth in reasons, we must accept the PSR. And if you only accept the weakened PSR to allow for brute facts, you still can’t disprove the stronger PSR without also accepting PSR (either the strong PSR is necessary, in which case you need to accept it, or it’s contingent, in which case questioning it presupposes that brute facts can’t exist, since you clearly don’t accept it as a brute fact/ungrounded if you demand grounds for it).
I don't see why it's true, in any scenario, that to dispute P is to imply that P is contingent.
> By grounding truth in reasons, we must accept the PSR.
Again, this is precisely what is in contention.
> And if you only accept the weakened PSR to allow for brute facts, you still can’t disprove the stronger PSR without also accepting PSR
You can disprove the strong PSR through the weak PSR. Even if it was true that you need some PSR or other to reason (that's still in dispute), if you grant the weak PSR, you have access to reasoning, and you can run the necessitarian argument against the strong PSR.
> either the strong PSR is necessary, in which case you need to accept it, or it’s contingent, in which case questioning it presupposes that brute facts can’t exist, since you clearly don’t accept it as a brute fact/ungrounded if you demand grounds for it
A. something can be necessarily false (The square root of 4 is odd). I can accept that something is a necessary fact, and claim that it is necessarily *false*.
B. I don't see why one can't reason about brute facts. If we consider bruteness to be limited to a particular scope (say, facts far afield of our day to day experience, highly abstract matters, etc) then we can argue the PSR meets just that sort of desiderata and thus is a plausible candidate for a brute fact. In any case, people demand arguments for brute postulates all the time! You just argue about them in non-traditional ways (i.e. from the fact that their postulation achieves certain theoretical virtues over and above any of the non-brute solutions).
C. This is sort of connected to A and B, but I'm agreeing the PSR is necessary. I just think it's necessarily false. I think the strong PSR entails necessitarianism, I think necessitarianism is false, so I think the PSR is false. I think the PSR if true, is true necessarily (or false necessarily), and so I think it's necessarily false.
I'm puzzled by something here. If we define the PSR as "all contingent truths have sufficient conditions," and per van Inwagen's necessitarianism counterargument, that converts all the supposedly contingent truths into necessary truths, then ultimately what are the "contingent truths" in PSR supposed to refer to?
You still appeal to this division between contingent truths and the mathematical/logical truths as necessary and grounding to evade regress, for example, but if PSR entails necessitarianism, then how can such a division remain standing?
Thanks for the review. The nature of contingent truths will be discussed on an upcoming article on counter-factuals and possible worlds that will hopefully address your concern (or else I’ll be looking forward to your criticism)
i earnestly recommend amy karofsky's book 'a case for necessitarianism'. it's an extremely well-written explication of necessitarianism and a refutation of contingentarianism. she doesn't reject the PSR, but it's not necessary for necessitarianism.
"It would be surprising to find that millenniums of human advancement and understanding of the physical world would end in the conclusion that everything is just brute and random and that all of our supposed "explanations" were pure, fortunate, accidents."
and
"Otherwise, science wouldn't be worth doing, as it's futile to search for underlying explanations of the world when those explanations aren't actually there."
seem to misunderstand randomness and/or an acausal humean mosaic. if in fact existence is random or necessitarianism is the case, i.e. stuff just happens, nothing can be in any way otherwise than it in fact is, it doesn't mean that there ever were accidents or fortunate occurrences or that experiences of surprisal against mistaken assumptions of contingency (possibility for things to be otherwise in some way) make sense.
similarly, appraisals like 'otherwise, science wouldn't be worth doing' if determinism or necessitarianism is true get randomness wrong. it's similar to saying that change is impossible if determinism is true, or that x will happen anyway, even if i'm not doing x. these are just confused. randomness can be *any pattern*. that's the mindfuck! randomness doesn't at all require culturally variable notions of weird or unexpected or outright bizarre occurrences. such a humean mosaic where the states of affairs occur randomly can be patterned in any way, eg. ways that hordes of causality simps would swear that such ways must feature causality, too!!!
as for the ineliminability of a principle or a concept, i'm extremely suspicious about boiling everything inferential/conjectural/vibes/hunches/guesses down to 'reasons' and immunizing the PSR that way. for me, epistemic ineliminables are more basic stuff like 'something exists', nothing complex like the PSR.
Thanks for the review.
“seem to misunderstand randomness and/or an acausal humean mosaic.”
I intend to show that the truth isn’t random, that there are no brute facts in principle, but what appears to be random/acausal are only gaps in our understanding. Randomness cannot truly exist in nature, but represents the limits of our sense making abilities. Stay tuned on how truth relates to reasons (and can’t be independent of reasons), proving the PSR.
"Deniers of the PSRs resemble so-called "global skeptics," who may say that they doubt their knowledge on paper—however, if you were to examine their lives, you'd see they, too, operate under the assumption of having (or not having) knowledge—no different than anyone else. They will never say as much, which is why actions count more than words."
This reminds me of mystics who claim "all is one and there is no difference between anything" or the sophists who claim "we cannot know anything really exists or is causal", yet will always act in the world with the expectation of consistency and differentiation. They know to turn on the same light using the same switch each time, and that their keys must have been misplaced rather than been stolen by a goblin.
I side with the mystics
and all this doesn't matter for the skeptical point. tell me the ways of distinguishing between a reality with causality and one without, but that is such that the states of affairs are distinguishable, non-static, patterned. that you point to particular behaviors doesn't get you one inch closer to a skepticism defeating method of inquiry; it's all just appealing to incredulity. you can view skeptical stances as trivial, outrageous, ridiculous, but you can't eliminate them.
I’m glad you brought up the skeptical challenge. The philosophy I lay out is immune to skepticism.
I side with the skeptics on the uncertainty of the external world, but the skeptic can never deny the existence of “reasons” as I have defined them. For if they do, then their skepticism couldn’t itself be justified, and their criticism becomes self-defeating (“if no one has any reasons, then the skeptic has no reason for their skepticism and my view od reasons stand”). I will dedicate an article fleshing out this argument in greater detail, so stay tuned.
“all contingent facts have reasons for their existence. For every contingent fact ("X"), there is a sufficient condition ("Y").”
This formulation of the PSR is all fine and good, but it notably leaves necessary truths ‘off the table’ so to speak. That being the case it’s hard to see why providing arguments against this formulation of the PSR would assume it’s truth or falsity, since the PSR, if true, is true necessarily.
Further it’s open to the denier of the standard PSR to adopt heavily weakened versions (all things probably have explanations, we should assume things have explanations unless given justification to the contrary, all things in the observable universe have explanations, etc.) All of those weakened principles are going to be compatible with daily invocations of reason, scientific practice, and so on, but will leave the proponent of the weakened principles able to say, for instance, that the existence of the universe is a brute fact.
In connection with my original point, any principle that amounts to ‘we should have justifications for all our beliefs’ is going to be compatible with asking for justification of the PSR, but won’t entail the PSR. So all someone needs is to accept a principle along those lines and they can question the PSR without accepting it, and if that’s true then the questioning the PSR isn’t inherently self defeating. “But if a fact is brute how can you have a justified belief in that fact?” Because you can have reasons for thinking that fact *is brute*.
Thanks for the comment! The nature of necessary truths will be discussed later, but I’d rather have this version of the PSR (only with respect for contingent truths) for clarify.
By grounding truth claims on reasons, we accept the PSR, and by demanding reasons for the PSR, we implicitly accept it. Otherwise, our demand for reasons would be ungrounded. If questioning the PSR didnt also imply the PSR, then questioning would be arbitrary.
Why do you doubt the PSR and what use are reasons to resolve that doubt? This can only be answered by accepting the PSR.
Why only argue for the weakened PSR when the stronger one works fine and plays an even stronger grounding role?
> By grounding truth claims on reasons, we accept the PSR, and by demanding reasons for the PSR, we implicitly accept it. Otherwise, our demand for reasons would be ungrounded. If questioning the PSR didnt also imply the PSR, then questioning would be arbitrary.
This is precisely what's in question! I bring up weakened PSRs because even if it's true that reasoning presumes some PSR or other, its not at all clear that it requires your strong version. But the other point I'm making is that your formulation of the PSR concerns only contingent facts. The PSR, if true, is true necessarily and not contingently. Given that, it's not clear how arguing against the PSR assumes the PSR, when the PSR isn't within it's own purview so to speak.
> Why do you doubt the PSR and what use are reasons to resolve that doubt?'
Because I think the strong PSR entails necessitarianism, for roughly van inwagen style reasons.
> Why only argue for the weakened PSR when the stronger one works fine and plays an even stronger grounding role?
See above
>Because I think the strong PSR entails necessitarianism, for roughly van inwagen style reasons.
This is a problem for contingentism, rather than the PSR.
>This is precisely what's in question! I bring up weakened PSRs because even if it's true that reasoning presumes some PSR or other, its not at all clear that it requires your strong version. But the other point I'm making is that your formulation of the PSR concerns only contingent facts.
No one is required to take the stronger version, but the stronger version is equally compatible with reasoning. Why take the weaker version when the stronger one is just as available?
>The PSR, if true, is true necessarily and not contingently. Given that, it's not clear how arguing against the PSR assumes the PSR, when the PSR isn't within it's own purview so to speak.
If you treat the PSR as a truth which may or may not be true (contingently true) by demanding proof for it, you are assuming the PSR’s truth necessarily. This is why criticism of the PSR is self-defeating, by treating it as a contingent truth, we take it is a necessarily truth. And which is why the PSR can’t be a contingent truth, for treating it as such is self undermining. This is further proof of it being necessary.
I think you should take a weakened version (if you take one at all) because the strong version entails necessitarianism, as I mentioned above. Re: your other comment about contingentarianism, I don't quite know what you mean by that, but as far as I can tell it's an entailment from the PSR (and my understanding reasons as entailing) that the strong PSR entails necessitarianism. It doesn't involve any other commitments of mine.
> If you treat the PSR as a truth which may or may not be true (contingently true) by demanding proof for it, you are assuming the PSR’s truth necessarily. This is why criticism of the PSR is self-defeating, by treating it as a contingent truth, we take it is a necessarily truth. And which is why the PSR can’t be a contingent truth, for treating it as such is self undermining. This is further proof of it being necessary.
Demanding proof for P doesn't entail that P is contingent. If I ask for a proof of Goldbach's conjecture, I am not thereby supposing Goldbach's conjecture is contingent. Also, a principle like "we generally need to provide reasons for things" or "all else equal, things tend to have reasons" will do just as well to sanction my request for a justification of the PSR. The Strong PSR quite obviously isn't the only game in town for justifying requests for reasons, and weakened versions which are compatible with bruteness can just as well ground asking for reasons for the PSR.
>Demanding proof for P doesn't entail that P is contingent. If I ask for a proof of Goldbach's conjecture, I am not thereby supposing Goldbach's conjecture is contingent.
Yea, this is true except for reasoning itself. By grounding truth in reasons, we must accept the PSR. And if you only accept the weakened PSR to allow for brute facts, you still can’t disprove the stronger PSR without also accepting PSR (either the strong PSR is necessary, in which case you need to accept it, or it’s contingent, in which case questioning it presupposes that brute facts can’t exist, since you clearly don’t accept it as a brute fact/ungrounded if you demand grounds for it).
> Yea, this is true except for reasoning itself.
I don't see why it's true, in any scenario, that to dispute P is to imply that P is contingent.
> By grounding truth in reasons, we must accept the PSR.
Again, this is precisely what is in contention.
> And if you only accept the weakened PSR to allow for brute facts, you still can’t disprove the stronger PSR without also accepting PSR
You can disprove the strong PSR through the weak PSR. Even if it was true that you need some PSR or other to reason (that's still in dispute), if you grant the weak PSR, you have access to reasoning, and you can run the necessitarian argument against the strong PSR.
> either the strong PSR is necessary, in which case you need to accept it, or it’s contingent, in which case questioning it presupposes that brute facts can’t exist, since you clearly don’t accept it as a brute fact/ungrounded if you demand grounds for it
A. something can be necessarily false (The square root of 4 is odd). I can accept that something is a necessary fact, and claim that it is necessarily *false*.
B. I don't see why one can't reason about brute facts. If we consider bruteness to be limited to a particular scope (say, facts far afield of our day to day experience, highly abstract matters, etc) then we can argue the PSR meets just that sort of desiderata and thus is a plausible candidate for a brute fact. In any case, people demand arguments for brute postulates all the time! You just argue about them in non-traditional ways (i.e. from the fact that their postulation achieves certain theoretical virtues over and above any of the non-brute solutions).
C. This is sort of connected to A and B, but I'm agreeing the PSR is necessary. I just think it's necessarily false. I think the strong PSR entails necessitarianism, I think necessitarianism is false, so I think the PSR is false. I think the PSR if true, is true necessarily (or false necessarily), and so I think it's necessarily false.
I'm puzzled by something here. If we define the PSR as "all contingent truths have sufficient conditions," and per van Inwagen's necessitarianism counterargument, that converts all the supposedly contingent truths into necessary truths, then ultimately what are the "contingent truths" in PSR supposed to refer to?
You still appeal to this division between contingent truths and the mathematical/logical truths as necessary and grounding to evade regress, for example, but if PSR entails necessitarianism, then how can such a division remain standing?
Thanks for the review. The nature of contingent truths will be discussed on an upcoming article on counter-factuals and possible worlds that will hopefully address your concern (or else I’ll be looking forward to your criticism)