The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil. — Bertrand Russell

:D

Bruteness seems profound, but then you realize you can arbitrarily make anything lacking agreed upon explanation brute. Why is it that anything exists? Because something (some things) just happen(s) to exist. And why is that something and not something else? Just because? — Marchesk

Aren't you being circular though? Brute facts don't have explanations. But you want there to be an explanation for what makes a brute fact.

I don't think bruteness seems profound. To a rational fellow like Spinoza, say, it is on the contrary intellectually annoying, so he finds various cunning ways of saying there is no such thing. Surely bruteness says, even to the rationalist: Sorry, mate, this is as far as your fancy-shmancy reason will go. From hereon in it's metaphysics or blind bloody prejudice.

Aren't you being circular though? Brute facts don't have explanations. But you want there to be an explanation for what makes a brute fact. — mcdoodle

I suppose. So the only difference between a contingent fact and a brute one is bruteness. It's just odd that some things are contingent and others are brute, but there is no reason for that difference. Maybe it's because one can keep on asking "but why?", which leaves one a bit annoyed and dissatisfied when someone else says, "just because".

It is dissatisfying, but sometimes some old bugger says 'I refute it thus!' and then you're stuck for an answer, and have to wander off to find questions which seem to have replies :).

I can empathize with your concerns there, but I don't think it's any better to say that everything must have a reason, either. And "everything must have a reason" is going to wind up either being or resting on something that one accepts as a brute fact, anyway.

It really just comes down to psychological facts, often influenced by social facts. There are some things that some folks are fine accepting without requiring an explanation for them, and some things that they're not fine accepting. We usually don't have to dig very deep until we get to the stuff that people are fine accepting brutely--it's almost never more than a step back or two in a casual conversation. And everyone gets annoyed at someone asking "why" a bunch of times in a row--it quickly starts to seem like you're talking to a toddler or a troll. Everyone quickly gets to some "just because" equivalent. And really we have to in order to get anywhere, because otherwise we'd be giving supporting reasons/explanations until the end of time.

t is dissatisfying, but sometimes some old bugger says 'I refute it thus!' and then you're stuck for an answer, and have to wander off to find questions which seem to have replies :). — mcdoodle

Or hand waving, which Landru loved to do with experience, self and language, which is odd, since Moore did it to defend realism. I mention Landru, because he was the foremost defender of anti-realism on the old forum (and was a very eloquent debater).

I wonder if the hand waving away an argument originated in response to Moore's talk.

"everything must have a reason" is going to wind up either being or resting on something that one accepts as a brute fact, anyway. — Terrapin Station

Necessary beings aren't brute facts. I think of necessary existence as an infinite chain of explanations, there's the reason, then there's a deeper reason, and yet a deeper reason, and so on to infinity with each explanation being just a greater depth of that same reason. Only an infinite omniscience could really, truly, fully fathom that sort of metaphysically necessary existence.

Necessary beings aren't brute facts. — Sivad

I dont buy that it's not the same thing under another name. "Self-evident" too.

First, I want to own up to the fact that I've rephrased your question here. I'd prefer to talk about brute beliefs to brute facts. Hopefully that doesn't skew your focus too far astray, but let me know if it does and I'll try to reformulate my initial thoughts..


I guess I'd wonder how it is one builds explanations without there being some belief which is brute. There may be a problem of adjudicating which beliefs are better as brute beliefs, but I fail to see how reason gets off the ground without brute beliefs.



Brute beliefs can be arbitrarily selected because of their function within a set of rules for deliberating whether some statement is true. If you question the brute belief then it is no longer a brute belief. But just because a brute belief can be selected arbitrarily doesn't mean that all brute beliefs are selected arbitrarily. First, there can be more compulsions to accept a belief than reason alone -- so while a brute belief may not have a reason, i.e. it is not the product of rationality, it may still be grounded by extra-rational means.

Agreement is sort of an extra-rational means, at least with respect to deliberating on truth. Agreement clearly doesn't yield truth, yet it is a rule by which we can select brute beliefs which operate within a particular discussion. Faith is another -- by faith we accept such and such statements as true, even without demonstration. Certain kinds of emotional attachment or compulsion come to mind as well -- meaning, the sorts of emotions which aren't part of our rational process.


Also, it's worth noting that a belief can be brute in one conversation, but since questioning a belief turns it non-brute, that no belief is permanently brute. We'd just have to be compelled -- by other, extra-rational means -- to question said belief, and it would no longer function as a brute belief.

That is an interesting point. But then you're putting the creationist grounds for faith on par with any philosophical considerations, just as one example.

In a way, yeah. Though in another, I don't have that faith. So while I can understand where someone is coming from by seeing that I do have brute beliefs myself, they're just different, at the same time I couldn't accept an argument built on the premise of faith (at least with respect to creationism) just by the fact that I don't have that belief.

Also, I'd note that "creationist" can be construed pretty broadly. So depending on said creationist I'd be more or less willing to say that we're on par. So, for example, if someone is a Christian and takes the bible to be a literal document about the way the world was formed, for instance, I'd say that this isn't on par with some sort of deist conception of God, which isn't something I believe in but is also something which seems more akin (and thereby more difficult to decide between) to my beliefs.

Another problem is why would some things be brute when most things are not? What makes God, or Quantum Mechanics, or Daisen brute? What distinguishes the brutally existing things from the non-brutal ones? Is it just being brute? Is there a brute property? How does brute existence result in contingent existences? — Marchesk

I find this sort of comment strange. Bruteness to me seems synonymous with fundamentality. When materialists say that matter is "brute", some physicists say that QM is "brute", and some dualists say that consciousness is "brute", they seem to me to mean that it is fundamental. They aren't reducible to anything deeper (as far as we are concerned), but rather everything that exists reduces to them, so of course it should come as no surprise if the non-fundamental things in the world vastly outnumber the fundamental ones.

So if you're asking why some there are even fundamental (or brute) entities at all, then you seem to be suggesting that it can be otherwise. But unless we are willing to argue for turtles all the way down in all cases, then it seems like it's necessary that there be a fundamental level of some kind and that there exist fundamental entities that make up the universe.

I fail to see how reason gets off the ground without brute beliefs. — Moliere

I agree. Analytic philosophy tends to argue that one can somehow choose one's brute beliefs, or they're random. But they are historically-situated, and if we talk about beliefs in any time but our own, we tend to place them in a socio-historical context. Brute beliefs somehow rub off on you in your formative times without you realising until it's too late and, darn it, here they are, in your very sinews.

I was listening to Colin McGinn discuss the question of why anything exists at all. His analysis is that there has to be some things for which there is no explanation that explain the things that do have explanations. Something must be brute.

The only brute that I can think of is the contingency of everything, the fact that what is, could possibly be otherwise. if you bring God into the discussion as a brute fact then, I think we are no longer having a rational conversation, and while God may work for many as the brute fact of existence, I am not one of them.

The only "brute facts" beyond contingency itself are those we propose as self-evident, which may be epistemological necessary, but they are not ontologically guaranteed, they are only probable. McGinn suggests that some things must exist necessary in order to explain why other things exist, which I think maybe a reformulation of the necessity of first causes or the cosmological argument all over again.

"Nuh-uh", really?

if you bring God into the discussion as a brute fact then, I think we are no longer having a rational conversation, and while God may work for many as the brute fact of existence, I am not one of them. — Cavacava

Swinburne takes God as a brute fact, so it's not irrational, but the claim that necessary existence logically reduces to brute fact is just facile thinking.

What makes Swineburn's conversation about God a rational conversation? Does he rationally prove the existence of God or?

Part of McGinn's point is pretty straightforward, and similar to what @Moliere was saying, that relative to a given theory, something is explained and something isn't. That's interesting, and I would think uncontroversial.

But then it's natural to ask if there is anything that, relative to some largish class of theories, will always be in the "unexplained" bucket. Or even if there is something that will be unexplained for all conceivable theories. I would think it's around here we start talking about "brute facts."

Swinburne is a careful, competent thinker, he doesn't make any obvious mistakes. You can only dispute his conclusions by disputing his premises, and his premises are controversial. I think his argument against metaphysical necessity is weak, but it's still the best argument going.

The only brute that I can think of is the contingency of everything, the fact that what is, could possibly be otherwise. — Cavacava

So the way you see it something must exist but anything will do? Could have been a pickle, could have been a particle, anything from a mite to a unisivre would do?

There seem to be two kinds of brute facts: totalities and their attributes. Being is a totality. It is the brutest of all brute facts. Then we have questions about the nature of being: it is necessary, is it intentional, is it spirit, is it mind, is it matter, is it necessary or contingent, created or everlasting, is it something or is it nothing, and so on, or is it all and none of these things?

Within being there are beings or existents, and none of their existences are brute because they are always explainable in terms of prior existents.

No quite, I can't think of any reason why anything must/should or ought to exist, versus nothing. Any such reason fails, it suggests faith not reason. The world is the way it is, but we don't have, and I think in principle we cannot have an ontological stance in regard to why it is the way it is. This is the problem of a viewpoint from nowhere, we are infinitesimally minute part of the set of existent objects and we cannot get outside of this domain to define it.

The existence of something is usually understood to be necessary if its essence involves existence. Necessity is not explainable in any terms beyond itself (otherwise it would fail to be necessity). So, why would necessary existence not be a brute fact?

The only problem I see with it is the inelegance of the language. I would prefer 'irreducible' or 'absolute'.

if you bring God into the discussion as a brute fact then, I think we are no longer having a rational conversation, — Cavacava

It is worth recalling what problem the 'god of the philosophers' solved in the first place. The role it played was as the 'uncaused cause' (in Aristotle's terminology) to solve the problem of how, if everything is a contingent fact, that anything could come to exist at all. The proposal that everything simply happens as a consequence of contingency would not have been entertained by Aristotle, because it would amount to the abdication of reason or the abandonment of the search for an explanation. The thrust of traditional philosophy was to find the reasons for why things are the way they are, based on the assumption that there is indeed a reason for things being the way they are, and that this is something that philosophy is able to discern.

Of course over the course of history, that general sense of 'the reason for everything' became incorporated into theology, but to begin with it was quite distinct. The ancient idea of 'logos' (from which all the subjects ending in '-logy', i.e., forms of knowledge, are derived) was precisely that the Cosmos was 'animated by reason' and that the aim of philosophy (before it became empirical science) was to discover and elaborate it. This eventually assumed the form, almost the cliche, of 'God' handiwork', which were the terms the early moderns (Newton and others ) depicted it in.

What happened with the advent of modern thinking and the Enlightenment was the increasing rejection of such explanations and the attempt to find what is understood as purely naturalistic explanations. In the terms of the older tradition, this amounted to the rejection of the idea of formal and final causes, and the declaration that a complete explanation could be sought in the terms of a chain of material or efficient causes.

I think that is one of the unfortunate consequences of the absorption of traditional philosophy by theology. Whereas traditional philosophy had its religious aspects - compared to today, everyone was religious - it really was a separate and distinct discipline, neither scientific in today's sense, nor religious in the sense of founded on revelation. One indication of that is the change of the idea of Logos, which had been a magnificently fecund philosophical term in the ancient world, but which nowadays usually signifies the religious fundamentalism into which it has largely ossified.

Anyway, where I think the original distinction between formal and final causes, and efficient and material causes, can be discerned, is in the observation that, whilst science can discern the regularities which are generally referred to as scientific or natural laws, it can't as a matter of principle explain why those laws exist. In other words, the question of the nature of laws, is a different type of question to the question of what can be predicted on the basis of those laws. 'Why there are laws', is a metaphysical question. I think the fact of there being an order that manifests as such regularities or laws is what many people would (inelegantly) refer to as 'brute facts'.

I agree with most of what you outlined and additionally I think that while reason and logic are important to our experience of life, so are friendship, morality, aesthetics, religion, baseball and many aspects of life which have far more brute force than any rational argument. As long as nature is as it is, then regardless of how it got that way, it is coherent, lawful, predictable to a certain extent. The scientific image serves the manifest image.

The issue is where do we go from here? Wherever we go, we ought to be sure of the basics, since even small inaccuracies/bias/prejudice in foundations, such as those built on historical prejudices (like God), or 'brute facts', may cause larger problems, until they are sorted out into their own domain. Given the amount of knowledge available to a huge population in the world, I suspect/hope we will be seeing some amazing new advances in all parts of the human endeavor.

Instead of responding specifically, let's take an example.

One can state that constant conjunction of events is brute. It just so happens to be the case then when A & B then C. But nothing makes that be the case tomorrow. Then again, nothing keeps it from being the case a billion years from now. Humean causation it is.

But then someone else can't accept that events are conjoined for no reason, and that conjunction might not hold at any time in the future. So they propose that there are laws of nature necessitating the conjunction. And those are brute.

So how do we decide between the two? Is it a matter of aesthetics? I'm repelled by radical contingency while you're appalled at some mysterious, non-empirical laws making things happen?

A brute fact is something that exists without explanation. That could be God, the universe, logic, etc. — Marchesk

Must we postulate brute facts? Can we not more modestly admit that reasoning commences with foundational axioms?

"Nuh-uh", really? — Sivad

:-}

I think one of the things you're missing is that an argument has an audience. You have to expect that what you need/want to treat as a brute fact will be accepted as such by the target audience. If you don't think they'll go along, there's no point.

But you can also argue that something is a brute fact by going through the usual types of explanations offered for it and disposing of them. You might be able to do even better by providing a taxonomy of possible explanations and showing how nothing we might come up with anywhere in that taxonomy will work. That doesn't prove something cannot be explained, but it might be enough to make it likely, or plausible, or any of those substitutes for certainty that philosophers use.