Principle of Sufficient Reason

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/

by lainon • 9 years ago

130 68 9 years ago

plato.stanford.edu

manicmonad• 9 years ago

Why does this post exist?

lainon• 9 years ago

To show you the Principle of Sufficient Reason which might eventually trigger your intellectual curiosity

H4CK3RM4N• 9 years ago

Hacker News allows anything which might "stimulate intellectual curiosity".

sdenton4• 9 years ago

To encourage you to keep asking 'why' until you hit on something interesting...

bbcbasic• 9 years ago

Like a 4 yr old

jpttsn2• 9 years ago

I could argue that sometimes you won't find anything interesting, but that's probably interesting, defeating my example.

pizza• 9 years ago

For a sufficient reason.

baddox• 9 years ago

Ctrl-F "regress"

For me, with admittedly less than expert understanding of philosophical terminology and methodology, the obvious criticism of infinite regress is not sufficiently addressed.

ysleepy• 9 years ago

There are multiple paragraphs on it just above the Leibniz section (ctrl+f infinit).

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.

vinceguidry7• 9 years ago

I use the PSR all the time, I don't think that infinite regress causes any practical problems.

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.

gknoy• 9 years ago

I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest

As someone who asked "why?" all the time as a kid, I'd love to read your elaboration.

tbabb2• 9 years ago

I did not deeply read the whole article because it's pretty wordy and a lot of air, but there is a point where it discusses Leibniz "solution", which was "therefore God". Basically the well-discredited "unmoved mover" argument in a slightly different cloak. He goes on to try and prove that there cannot be two identical things in the universe, which I guess he must have done before anyone knew about fundamental particles.

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.

jawns• 9 years ago

well-discredited "unmoved mover" argument

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.

coldtea4• 9 years ago

He goes on to try and prove that there cannot be two identical things in the universe, which I guess he must have done before anyone knew about fundamental particles.

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.

ykler• 9 years ago

Here is one example of how a regress of explanation can terminate. Suppose you and I are old friends who haven't seen each other in years, and we happen to run into each other while we are both on trips to Japan. The answer to the question, "Why did we meet in Japan?" is that it was a coincidence -- which is a kind of way of saying there is no interesting explanation of precisely this fact (though there will certainly be explanations of causes of this coincidence such as our respective trips to Japan). You might try to generate a sort of regress by asking, "Why did this coincidence happen?", but the proper way to answer this question is to say that there aren't really reasons why specific coincidences happen, as opposed to other possible coincidences that didn't happen, though by further study of the general nature of coincidences and of this coincidence in particular, we might come to a more exact appreciation of how "big" a coincidence it is.

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.

eclat2• 9 years ago

Counterfactual Causation adresses that.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/...

BucketSort• 9 years ago

I recently started studying Leibniz in my spare time. I found this book to be a delightful introduction:

https://www.amazon.com/Leibniz-Very-Short-Introduction-Intro...

foldr4• 9 years ago

An interesting recent defense of the PSR: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/psr.pdf?c=phimp;...

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...

barrkel3• 9 years ago

There's a real risk of storytelling with 'why'. You can construct a narrative that explains anything - this is probably the primary thing our consciousness does when communicating to other people - but there's no necessary relationship between the story and the world, and humans are great at believing the stories they tell themselves.

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.

dorgo• 9 years ago

The different levels emerge from each other. And I don't think that we can be sure to have found the most basic one, or even to assume that there is a most basic level. But the emergent levels are not less 'real' than the more basic ones. There is more about emergent levels than just to hide details.

barrkel3• 9 years ago

Different abstraction levels are normally different ways of talking about the same physical phenomena. That is, they are parallel; they don't stack. The most basic one is the one that doesn't exist in our heads and doesn't have a model with predictions to violate.

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.

jwmerrill• 9 years ago

Atoms are an abstraction, just like the higher level abstractions you mention. They happen to be a very good/stable abstraction over the time/energy scales relevant to day-to-day life, but they too are made of pieces that can disintegrate, recombine, etc.

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.

barrkel3• 9 years ago

Sure; I'm using atoms to refer to physical reality rather than abstractions people are applying to the top; atoms more in the indivisible sense, than what you think of in the physics lexicon.

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.

bloaf• 9 years ago

My wariness with respect to the PSR are these two features:

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.

stanfordkid• 9 years ago

This exactly.

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.

empath75• 9 years ago

Science is as much a study of limitations of the human mind as it is of anything else.

justinpombrio2• 9 years ago

Take three principles:

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.

The Principle of Non-Cyclic Reasoning:

    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.

The Principle of No Infinite Regress:

    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.

You can't have all three: every directed graph whose nodes are facts and whose edges are "is one of the sufficient reasons for" either has (i) a dead-end, or (ii) a cycle, or (iii) an infinite chain.

For those who believe the PSR: which do you give up? Are you ok with cycles, or with infinite regress?

westoncb2• 9 years ago

I think your claim is true for a single moment in time, but if you look at the Principle of Sufficient Reason as only talking about the potential for facts to be explained in terms of other facts ("Every fact can be explained in terms of some other facts")—then I think dead ends at single points in time are fine.

justinpombrio2• 9 years ago

And the graph of all potential facts? Which does that have: dead ends, cycles, or infinite chains?

colanderman• 9 years ago

You're implicitly assuming the law of the excluded middle. Depending on the logical foundation, a fact chain could exist which is seemingly infinite, but for which no finite proof exists that it violates any of the three laws.

Chris2048• 9 years ago

There have to be logical axioms, on how to even represent, interpret or progress facts (all meaning, including interpretation of above paragraphs depend someone one these).

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

cs702• 9 years ago

Kurt Gödel had something to say about this. He proved that no formal system that is consistent is capable of proving (i.e., providing a sufficient reason for) all statements made within the system, including whether the formal system is consistent:

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.

woodandsteel• 9 years ago

The PSR seems to assume that the reasons are understandable by human intelligence, and hence the human mind, like a god, has no limits.

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.

Principle of Sufficient Reason

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