Explanation and Understanding: More on Bogardus

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21 responses to “Explanation and Understanding: More on Bogardus”

1. 

   Malcolm Pollack

   March 31, 2025

   Bill,
   Thank you for this clarifying distinction.
   It prompts me to ask: what would you say about an impersonal explanation that is unsuccessful, not because its conjuncts numerically overwhelm our finite minds, but because at least one of its most important conjuncts bottoms out swiftly, and in plain sight, on some proposition that calls out for explanation and hasn’t got one?

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2. 

   BV

   April 1, 2025

   You’re welcome, Malcolm.
   First, do you agree with me that Bogardus’s discussion confuses personal and impersonal explanation? That’s the main point I am making above. With respect to just that point, the question about brute facts is something of a red herring.
   Still, the question of brute facts is fascinating and important and I realize it is the one you (and me and Bogardus) are mainly interested in.
   Well, if an impersonal causal explanation ends or ‘bottoms out’ with a proposition that records a brute fact, then I would say the explanation is complete.
   Your question, however, is whether it is successful. Well, it is as successful as it could be given that there are brute facts. What you are really asking, I think, is whether such an explanation is satisfying to intellects of our sort, intellects that desire plenary, full, total understanding, all the way down, or up, with no ‘brutality’ anywhere.
   My answer to that question is No. But it might be that some of our natural desires just can’t satisfied. What we, or some of us anyway, want is total understanding: we want rational explanations that terminate in a self-explaining Explainer. Even Russell wants that; he just thinks it cannot be had. In his debate with the Thomist Copleston, he said that the universe just exists and that’s the end of it.
   Question is: can it be PROVEN (demonstrated, established beyond the shadow of a doubt) that there are no brute facts, and in particular that the existence of the universe is not a brute fact?
   I’d like to see the proof. We’ll continue with this.

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3. 

   Tom T.

   April 1, 2025

   Bill,
   >>I am having trouble understanding (2): it strikes me as ambiguous … << I had a similar confusion about Prop 2. Still, I concluded that the confusion stems from Dr Bogardus' use of the term "successful," when he intends it in the sense of the more rigorous "complete and unconditional." This way of looking at it is supported by a literal reading of Prop 2 and tracks with your 2b). Please read my comment at the end of the comments in the previous post. In sum, I state therein that this understanding of "successful" clarifies his argument as something relatively straightforward. If scientific explanations are not complete and unconditional, then Naturalism is not complete and unconditional, and we need something other than a Naturalism metaphysic for an ultimate explanation. >> I am also wondering whether ‘brutality,’ brute-factuality is a red herring here.<< In the context of "complete and unconditional," brute-factuality is not a red herring, but the relatively simple point that by definition a brute-factuality is not an explanation at all. It is a gesture, a shrug of the shoulders, that says, "That's just the way it is." It cannot be proven that "just the way it is" is not in fact the way things are, but as a mere assertion, it is not a complete and unconditional explanation. Therefore, on the theory of brute facts, science (and hence Naturalism) is not complete and unconditional. The same goes for explanatory turtles, which arise in scientific explanations whether you approach them from Dr B's nomo-logical deductive perspective or ground them in the concrete natural objects of investigation: "turtles all the way down" is a patently inconclusive explanation and therefore not complete and unconditional. I won't go on, except to reiterate what I said previously. On this understanding of his argument, I think Dr B makes a good case, but only for those who need ultimate explanations. Many, if not most these days, are quite satisfied with weak personal explanations. Knowing what they do not know is just not on their list of priorities.

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4. 

   Michael Brazier

   April 1, 2025

   I’m not sure that the distinction is correctly stated. In the specific example, the child is presumably well enough acquainted with the nature of trees to know that they don’t burst into flame of their own accord. So the question “why is the tree on fire?” is asking for the cause, external to the tree, that started the fire, and can be satisfied by identifying that cause, which is the lightning strike. But if the child knows nothing about lightning, he would not be satisfied by that answer; you would have to tell him about lightning, and explain why it happens, to succeed in explaining what happened to the tree.
   A personal explanation, that is, is successful because it’s complete, given the enquirer’s previous knowledge of the situation. An impersonal explanation isn’t related to anyone’s previous knowledge; it stands by itself. But then every personal explanation begins with, and gains most of its power to explain from, an already existing impersonal explanation, which was in some respect inadequate.
   If this is correct, though… how can there be any successful explanations, if an impersonal explanation is necessarily too big and complicated for our finite minds to encompass?

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5. 

   Dominik Kowalski

   April 1, 2025

   Bill,
   leaving aside proving impossibility, do you think a dialectical argument against their possibility has merit? I would argue that if they aren’t isolated, brute facts are contagious, so their interaction and causation with supposed non-brute objects, would always include bruteness, which would be transferred. There’s no guiding principle why a brute object of class X should obey the same laws, and persistently do so, as non-brute objects of the same class. As far as I can tell, there’s no restriction on what the brute fact in question might do. And the consequences for epistemology would be devastating.
   Rob Koons and Alexander Pruss have attempted a similar argument in their paper “Skepticism and the PSR”
   https://robkoons.net/uploads/1/3/5/2/135276253/koons-pruss2020_article_skepticismandtheprincipleofsuf.pdf
   >>and in particular that the existence of the universe is not a brute fact?<< I remember distinctly a remark by your old friend Quentin Smith. Sadly, I couldn't find it again (I thought that Craig quoted it once, but the amount of Results for "Quentin Smith" on his website has become quite large). But Smith saw with clarity, that the bruteness of the existence of the universe not only applied to its possible beginning, but also to its persistence. And, to paraphrase, Smith expressed how marvellous it is, that the universe should to continue to exist, despite there being no reason to. Although it could go out of existence at any moment, it never does. Let's leave out again the question of whether there's any logical inconsistency here. Clearly there isn’t. But good philosophy should make a real difference, it should be reasonably believed and the expressed propositions should be lived accordingly to, if they express something that would have such an impact in our lives and thinking. Otherwise,by my light, we’re just playing language games.
   So to dialectically justify the claim that the existence of the universe can’t be a brute fact, or if it is, it can’t be rationally believed that it is, I would say that it is impossible for us to live according to the idea that at every instance of time there’s a real chance that all of existence evaporates into nothingness. Building upon that idea, we would also have to take seriously the idea that every current moment is the first one in time, brutely arranged in such a way as to suggest, that you commented on your own post in the past. Theoretically, these skeptical scenarios could be applied to a theistic worldview as well. But it seems to me that the phenomenal conservatism we all live by in everyday life, is only sustainable if we admit of the rational structure.
   So to summarize, if there’s no metaphysical principle underlying the universes existence, the same goes for continued existence. And while a logical proof of impossibility seems impossible, we can show that it can’t be rationally believed. And since we in this life have no access to absolutely certain knowledge, I think that’s good enough.

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6. 

   BV

   April 1, 2025

   Tom,
   When I said that the question about brute facts is a red herring, I meant that it distracts from the question whether Bogardus is confusing personal with impersonal explanation. It may of course be that he is clear in his own mind about the distinction, which is already in the literature, and not first made by me, but that his presentation is misleading.
   Now: can you prove that there are brute facts? Or prove the opposite? That is the really interesting issue. The fact that we quite naturally desire plenary explanations ‘cuts no ice’: it des not prove that there are no brute facts.

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7. 

   BV

   April 1, 2025

   Michael,
   You are missing the point. The child knows lightning when he sees it, and he understands the word. He may even know that it is an atmospheric electrical discharge. The point is that successful personal explanation of the cause of the tree’s being on fire can, pace Bogardus, stop right there and needn’t continue with an explanation of exactly which particular events and factors brought about that particular bolt of lightning. A successful personal explanation needn’t be a complete explanation, and it needn’t involve regress to an unexplained explainer.

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8. 

   BV

   April 1, 2025

   Dominik,
   Thanks for the Koons & Pruss article. I’ll have to study it.
   Some distinguish between epistemic brute facts and ontic brute facts. As I understand it, a fact is e-brute if it has no explanation given what we know. Since what we know is limited, it may well be that a given e-brute fact is not o-brute.
   The question that bugs me and Malcolm is whether there are any o-brute facts.
   You raise an interesting question about the contagiousness and transferrability of ontic brutality. An example would be nice.
   Dear old Quentin, he died too young for a philosopher! He was the real thing in a world of academic hacks. An unforgettable character and an inspiration to me.
   >> But Smith saw with clarity, that the bruteness of the existence of the universe not only applied to its possible beginning, but also to its persistence. And, to paraphrase, Smith expressed how marvellous it is, that the universe should to continue to exist, despite there being no reason to. Although it could go out of existence at any moment, it never does.<< Well, if you can bring yourself to believe that the universe exploded into existence out of literally nothing, then it is consistent with that to believe that its continuing to exist, moment-by-moment, needs no sustaining Cause, and continues by 'existential inertia.' >>So to summarize, if there’s no metaphysical principle underlying the universe’s existence, the same goes for [its] continued existence. And while a logical proof of the impossibility [of brute facts] seems impossible, we can show that it can’t be rationally believed. And since we in this life have no access to absolutely certain knowledge, I think that’s good enough.<< You are coming close to my view, but you are still a ways away from it. I would put it like this. One cannot PROVE that there is a metaphysical principle underlying the universe's existence. And one cannot PROVE the opposite. Both thesis and antithesis are rationally acceptable, which implies that neither is rationally mandatory. Discursive reason cannot resolve the question. So in the end you must DECIDE what you will believe and how you will act in this matter and in plenty of others. The WILL comes into it. The decision is not arbitrary in the pejorative sense because the decision is arrived at after canvassing very carefully all the arguments pro et contra, and the decision is responsibly maintained by continuing to ponder the questions and the arguments, always ready to change one's view in the face of further arguments and evidence. So I disagree with you when you say that we can show that it cannot be rationally believed that there are no brute facts, and that, in particular, the existence and continuance of the universe are not brute facts.

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9. 

   Malcolm Pollack

   April 1, 2025

   I’d just add here that the possibility of the universe simply ceasing to exist in the next moment is just as imaginable under a radical theological voluntarism (as we see, particularly, in much of Islamic theology) as it is in a brutalist ontology — the difference being that one imagines that God, at least, has reasons for creating and sustaining the world, while “bruteness” doesn’t.

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10. 

    BV

    April 2, 2025

    Malcolm,
    That’s right. On either scheme, the universe exists contingently. Hence it is possible that it cease to exist in the next moment, either because God freely decides to ‘pull the plug’ on it, or because it simply stops existing. And note that this is as true in standard Xianity as it is in Islam.
    A different but related issue concerns whether ex nihilo nihil fit is logically compatible with divine creation ex nihilo.

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11. 

    Dominik Kowalski

    April 2, 2025

    Bill,
    I’ll take a stab at these objections.
    >>The contagiousness of ontic brute facts<< I'll make two points here. The first is from another friend of yours, Ed Feser. His example was the book on the shelf. The book got hold up by a wooden plank. The plank in return is hold up by some brackets. But there was nothing sustaining the brackets, that they remain in place is a brute fact. The bruteness isn't restricted to the brackets here; if that on which they are dependent is brute, then neither the position of the plank nor of the book can be a fully intelligible fact. Secondly, let's look at existence again. We don't need the assumption that everything needs existential sustainment from the ultimate brute fact. Let's assume it's a fundamental physical, and everything else needs it for its initial coming into existence (let's grant existential inertia). What's transferred from the brute fact, will be brute. If a brutely existing object causes you to exist, the existence in question stems from a brute source. In order to prevent contagion we somehow need a principle that makes the existence subject to metaphysical principles at some point in the process. But how exactly is that supposed to work? Brute facts have no boundaries on what they might do. I see no justification in assuming that this doesn't go for the aspect in other entities which they cause. Say, for illustrations sake, the cause of existence in this case would be initial unification with persistent relations. The unification is the point of interaction of the brute fact with the caused being. But if the brute fact could possibly come and cease as it goes, why shouldn't that also go for its own effects? These are just a consequence of its own unintelligible nature, after all. >>The Believability of a Brute Beginning and Existential Inertia<< You and I are both aware that EI is parasitic upon the notion of existence applied. In yours and Aquinas's system, it is impossible. Fundamentally, it just states that objects remain in existence, once they're in it. However, if the existence in question is a brute fact, by necessity, this existence would remain so as well. I've granted EI in the previous paragraph, but in reality, particularly in the scenario we've been talking about, it has nothing to contribute. Particularly within a brute fact itself, EI would be relegated from a metaphysical principle to a mere description. That is because not only by its own definition is it based on the particular existence of an object and at best capable of accounting for its persistence. But especially in regards to brute facts, existence becomes elusive for any kind of attempt to put it under some rules. By the the nature of brutality, there's nothing that makes it subject to any rules; we would just have to accept their existence. And I see Smith as having affirmed just that. He himself was no proponent of EI; if he was, the marvellous continuous existence wouldn't have been marvellous at all (I promise I'll look for the quote and send it to you via email). That's also why I deny the parallel from past brute beginnings. The past doesn't cause existential angst, I'm not worried that the world ceased to be last week. But if existence isn't bolted down and the world or items within it might cease at any future moment, this has far more immediate consequences. Combine this with the idea that bruteness allows to take the first moment in time to take the shape of this particular moment of me writing, with some of the arguments in Koons & Pruss and I would say that we arrive at global skepticism. And that is where I think the unbelievability comes in: 1) If a rational mind believes a proposition with consequences in the real life, he will act according to it. 2) If a rational mind affirms propositions that entail conclusion X, he will act according to X. 3) If the consequences entail Skepticism, the rational mind will act according to such Skepticism. 4) No rational mind can or actively does consistently act according to Skepticism. 5) Therefore one or more of the initial propositions must be false. This is not perfect, but sketches what I'm trying to get at. We can't live this life while being skeptical about such obvious things as us having this conversation on your blog. And I take you to agree with the idea that philosophy makes a real difference, at least it can be. The most immediate example would be ethics or religion, and if we sincerely believe a proposition here, we should act accordingly. A person sincerely convinced that murder is wrong can't turn into Ted Bundy. The way out is to show that Bruteness doesn't entail Skepticism. In that case though, one needs a principled proposal to show that the unintelligibility of Brutality can be tamed. Can that be done? At which point does bruteness turn intelligible? When does it cease to be rebellious?

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12. 

    Dominik Kowalski

    April 2, 2025

    Apologies for the bad format. I copied the response from my notes

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13. 

    Tom T.

    April 3, 2025

    Bill,
    >>Now: can you prove that there are brute facts? Or prove the opposite? << My answer is limited to the question of ontic brute facts. From your reply to Malcolm above: "[Russell said] that the universe just exists and that's the end of it." As brute facts go, existence is pretty good, or at least a plausible candidate. I read somewhere (Woody Allen, perhaps?) that Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" can also be rendered as "There goes Aunt Ethel down the street, therefore I am" and be just as true. My existence, your existence, Mt Rushmore's and everything else's existence is simply a brute fact - "and that's the end of it." But your question is, can the brute fact of existence be proven or disproven? My answer is no. Kierkegaard, following Kant (to some degree): "I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence … For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone … Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius, it can never be demonstrated. " A demonstration, a proof, an explanation can be fashioned out of the properties/relations of things that exist. But those properties are abstracta, applying to this thing and many others, and cannot function to prove or disprove the non-conceptual, non-theoretical particularity and sheer haecceity of any existent. Abstracta do not distinguish between the various things that exist, they simply inhabit them. It is existence that distinguishes, but without a conceptual mark, there is nothing to hang a conceptual proof on.

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14. 

    Tom T.

    April 3, 2025

    Bill,
    I neglected the general conclusion to your question. I would submit that any proposed brute fact other than existence would be subject to the same analysis and conclusion. A brute fact can only be that which is non-conceptual and non-theoretical and operates as an accessorium (addition) or prius (presupposition) of any demonstration or explanation – otherwise it would not be brute.

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15. 

    Dmitri

    April 3, 2025

    Bill
    I tried but have not managed to understand the relevance of the distinction you made in the post between personal and impersonal explanation to the topic of scientific explanation that Dr B relies upon in his article.
    There are many competing philosophical theories of scientific explanation, but none I am aware of considers a possibility that scientific explanation — the way you illustrate it in the post — bears any necessary or sufficient relationship to personal explanation.
    I won’t repeat the points about Dr B’s account I’ve already made in the thread of the previous post on the subject. I did not see them addressed. I believe they are valid.
    Coincidentally yesterday (Apr 2) SEP published a revised entry on models in science. Naturally this article mentions scientific explanation many times and contains insightful discussions on the role of models in this context. Anyone who is interested in this complex subject would benefit from reading the article which contains many useful references. Nancy Cartwright, the philosopher of science I mentioned already, prominently figures in the article. The SEP entry shows quite persuasively why Hempel’s model, on which Dr B’s account implicitly relies, is not a successful theory of scientific explanation (friendly pun intended). In a nutshell, Hempel completely missed the crucial role of experiments and modelling in scientific explanations. Laws, propositions and logical derivations play a role too, but without these other aspects (and math and math structures figuring in them) the explanations are usually not really scientific.
    Link to the article: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/models-science/

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16. 

    BV

    April 5, 2025

    Dmitri,
    I believe you and I are at cross purposes given the criss-crossing themes that B’s article raises.
    In any case, did you see the reply he made to you in the earlier entry?
    https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2025/03/naturalism-and-brute-facts.html?cid=6a010535ce1cf6970c02e860e63ed7200b#comment-6a010535ce1cf6970c02e860e63ed7200b

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17. 

    Tom T.

    April 6, 2025

    >>Dilemma: Explanation is either personal or impersonal. If the former, the explanation may be successful in generating understanding, but cannot be completely true. If the latter, the explanation may be completely true, but cannot be successful in generating understanding in finite minds like ours.<< As much as I understand it, I agree with your distinction b/t personal and impersonal explanations and the possibility that Dr Bogardus is ambiguous about what he is referring to. But in the context of scientific explanations, it seems to me that you have made a supplemental argument that confirms (and perhaps disambiguates) Dr B's argument, that scientific explanations are not complete and unconditional. That is, you allow that personal explanations "cannot be completely true," and that impersonal explanations "cannot be successful in generating understanding in finite minds like ours." In either case, scientific explanations are not complete and unconditional and cannot support an absolute Naturalism metaphysic, which I take to be precisely Dr B's argument.

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18. 

    Dmitri

    April 6, 2025

    Hi Bill
    I missed the response you linked to, thank you for providing it. I believe I understand what Dr B is driving at and the main points of his argument. That does not make it easier to accept his intuitions and some definitions about how explanations work in science. I won’t go as far as to suggest that he builds and attacks a straw man, however Hempel’s conception of science and scientific explanation – on which he strongly relies – is static, deductive and disregards the role of models and experiments in science and is widely considered an outdated oversimplification.
    I do believe Dr B’s statement that “I wrote this article in order to better know important truths, and I aim to know important truths because it’s good to do so.”. I just think that it is important to aim at more convincing and adequate conceptions of scientific explanation and Naturalism than his article does.

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19. 

    David Brightly

    April 6, 2025

    My apologies for being late to this discussion. I have a couple of points that have not yet been made, I think.
    A. TB’s premise (2) is that an unexplained explainer is no explainer at all. He offers the tower of turtles as a paradigm case of this. I say that the turtle tower fails to explain the Earth’s rest not because the turtles are unexplained but because the first turtle alone fails to explain it. The claim that the first turtle is at rest merely repeats the claim that the Earth is at rest. A turtle after all is just another body like the Earth and conjoined they make one body. An explanation of the restfulness of the Earth would require something radically different. For example, we might say that the Earth is the axle about which the wheel of the heavens rotates, thus making an appeal to a familiar model of rest versus motion. It’s a pity that, as TB admits, his paradigm case requires us to think pre-scientifically. The temptation is to dismiss the argument because it concerns an understanding of absolute rest, a concept making no sense to us moderns.
    B. TB’s conception of understanding seems to be one of exceptionless explanation. This amounts to deduction from necessary or at any rate intuitively held axioms. This seems both too narrow and too demanding. I like to think I have an understanding of the natural numbers and their arithmetic. But this understanding was acquired long before I heard about the Peano axioms.
    C. The arc of (physical) science appears to account for entities and phenomena of more and more kinds by means of hypothetical entities and processes of fewer and fewer kinds, and this constitutes its success. But it represents a retreat from truth and fact, brute or otherwise. It’s tempting to think that we are rubbing up against the limits of what our embodied minds can achieve.

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20. 

    BV

    April 6, 2025

    You are a bright guy, David — your surname is an aptronym — but I think you have missed the point in paragraph (A). Surely TB is not trying to explain what is not the case, and what he knows is not the case, namely, that the Earth is at rest, by positing that it rests on a turtle, which rests on a turtle, etc. What is not the case cannot be explained. And not because it is a brute fact, but because it is not a fact at all.
    The turtle business is just a colorful way of making the claim that if an event such as Ignition (mentioned above by me) is explained in terms of an earlier event Strike, the explanation cannot count as successful unless the causal regress terminates in an event or thing that itself needs no explanation. Whether or not that it true, it cannot be dismissed as based on pre-scientific mythology.
    One of the points I made is that TB confuses personal and impersonal explanations and successful and complete explanations. I made the point that a successful personal explanation need not be complete.
    If I understood Dmitri, he made the point that TB relies to heavily on Hempel’s D-N model.
    Both me and Dmitri engage with what TB is actually saying.
    As for para (B), I don’t think it hits TB either since I don’t think he is aiming at a general theory of understanding, but only at a theory of understanding pertaining to the explanation of physical phenomena.
    (C) is intriguing and you need to say more to make it clear. Are you suggesting that science falsifies the world we encounter via the senses? Is it a retreat from truth and fact when we speak of ideal gases and frictionless planes?

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21. 

    David Brightly

    April 8, 2025

    Hello Bill, Let me try again. I think Tomas’s (2) is false and that his case for it is flawed. Not because it is based on pre-scientific mythology, but because Tomas mis-locates the problem with the turtle tower explanation. It’s not that the turtles are unexplained, rather that a turtle (whose existence may or may not be explained) does not constitute an explanation for the Earth’s rest. Anything that could grant stasis to a turtle could equally grant it to the Earth, for they are both physical bodies with no relevant differences in this context. Galileo would make this point, I think.
    Tomas appears to use ‘successful’ where you would use ‘complete’. The latter occurs only in the endnotes. But if we were to substitute your ‘complete’ for Tomas’s ‘successful’ I would have little to quibble with, I think, though the case for (2) would remain flawed.
    Regarding (C) I would say that science accounts for the world of the senses by hypothesising entities and processes that we do not encounter through the senses. In gases, temperature and pressure are explained by the motion of unseen particles plus the principles of mechanics. If to speak the truth is to say how the world given by the senses goes, and to not say otherwise, how can we speak truth of the unseen? The entities of science seem beyond the realm of truth, so I am uncomfortable with the phrase ‘scientific knowledge’. Ideal gases and frictionless planes are surely limit cases to which real gases and surfaces may approximate, but they live in the theoretical world. We can apply our understanding to these limit cases and hope to get answers that approximate to experimental results. And for some more tractable theories we can estimate the degrees of approximation we can expect.

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