Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Naturalism, Ultimate Explanation, and Brute Facts and Laws

Malcolm Pollack solicited my comments on an article by Tomas Bogardus that appeared in Religious Studies under the title, If naturalism is true, then scientific explanation
is impossible.

Malcolm summarizes:

I’ve just read a brief and remarkably persuasive philosophical paper by Tomas Bogardus, a professor of philosophy at Pepperdine University. In it, he argues that, if we are to have confidence in the explanatory power of science (and he believes we should), then the naturalistic worldview must be false.

Here is the abstract:

I begin by retracing an argument from Aristotle for final causes in science. Then, I advance this ancient thought, and defend an argument for a stronger conclusion: that no scientific explanation can succeed, if Naturalism is true. The argument goes like this: (1) Any scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity. Next, I argue that (2) any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one. From (1) and (2) it follows that (3) a scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity, and this regularity does not call out for explanation while lacking
one. I then argue that (4) if Naturalism is true, then every natural regularity calls out for explanation but lacks one. From (3) and (4) it follows that (5) if Naturalism is true, then no scientific explanation can be successful. If you believe that scientific explanation can be (indeed, often has been) successful, as I do, then this is a reason to reject Naturalism.

Keywords: philosophy of religion; philosophy of science; scientific explanation; naturalism; supernaturalism; theism; atheism

The gist of the argument is that science, which is in the business of explaining observable phenomena, must offer for every explanandum (i.e., that which is to be explained) some explanans (that which explains). But if the explanans itself requires explaining, the explanation is incomplete, and must rest upon some deeper explanans.

Bogardus’s paper explores the varieties of possible explanatory regression. Either a) we bottom out on a “brute fact”, or b) we encounter an infinite stack of explanations (“turtles all the way down”), or c) our explanations loop back on themselves (so that at some point every explanandum also becomes an explanans), or d) we come at last to some explanans that breaks the chain, by requiring no further explanation.

Bogardus argues that of all brute facts, infinite regressions, and circular explanations explain nothing; the only kind of thing that will serve is (d). But the “laws of nature” do not meet this requirement, because they do not (and cannot) explain themselves.

The heart of Bogardus’s argument, then, is that only some sort of necessary truth, some teleological principle that stands outside of the chain of scientific explanation, can serve as the anchor to which that chain must be fastened. And because Naturalism admits of no such entity, then if scientific explanations are to be considered valid, Naturalism must be false.

My Evaluation

It is given that nature is regular. She exhibits all sorts of regularities. Some of them are codified in scientific law statements. Coulomb's Law, for example, states that particles of like charge repel and particles of unlike charge attract. Another regularity we are all familiar with is that if a gas is heated it expands. This is why I do not store my can of WD-40 in the garage in the Arizona summer. The regularity is codified is Gay Lussac's law: the pressure of a given amount of gas held at constant volume is directly proportional to the Kelvin temperature.  Now why should that be the case? What explains the law? The kinetic theory of gases. If you heat a gas you give the molecules more energy so they move faster. This means more impacts on the walls of the container and an increase in the pressure. Conversely if you cool the molecules down they will slow down and the pressure will be decreased. The temperature of the gas varies with the kinetic energy of the gas molecules. 

But invoking the kinetic theory of gases is not an ultimate explanation.  What about those molecules and the laws that govern them?

So here is a question for Malcolm: Is Bogardus assuming that a genuine explanation must be or involve an ultimate explanation? And if he is making that assumption, is the assumption true?

Here is another example. Farmer John's crops have failed. Why? Because of the drought. The drought in turn is explained in terms of atmospheric conditions, which have their explanations, and so on. Question is: have I not explained the crop failure by just saying that that drought caused it?

Must I explain everything to explain anything? Is no proximate explanation a genuine explanation?

But we are philosophers in quest of the ultimate. That's just the kind of people we are. So we want ultimate explanations. And let us suppose, with Bogardus, that such explanations cannot be non-terminating, that is, they cannot be infinitely regressive or 'loopy,' i.e. coherentist.  Ultimate explanations must end somewhere.  Bogardus:

. . . I believe many Naturalists subscribe to scientific explanation in the pattern of Brute Foundationalism, either of the Simple or Extended variety, depending on the regularity. Here’s Carroll’s (2012, 193) impression of the state of the field: ‘Granted, it is always nice to be able to provide reasons why something is the case. Most scientists, however, suspect that the search for ultimate explanations eventually terminates in some final theory of the world, along with the phrase “and that’s just how it is”.’31

My question to Malcolm (and anyone): Why can't scientific explanations end with brute laws and brute facts? Has Bogardus given us an argument against brute laws? I don't see that he has. Or did I miss the argument for (2) below in Bogardus's main argument:

 

1) Any scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural
regularity.
2) Any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls
out for explanation but lacks one.
3) So, a scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural
regularity, and this regularity does not call out for explanation while lacking one.

4) If Naturalism is true, then every natural regularity calls out for explanation but
lacks one.
5) So, if Naturalism is true, then no scientific explanation can be successful.

Bogardus tries to argue for (2), but I don't see that he succeeds in giving us a non-question-begging reason to accept (2).

I myself reject naturalism and brute facts. My point is that Bogardus has failed to refute it and them. He has merely opposed it and them.  As I use 'refute,' it is a verb of success.  To oppose me is not to refute me. I will oppose you right back.

There is another question that I will address in a separate post:  Can it be demonstrated that there is a Necessary Explainer? Pace the presuppositionalists, the demonstration cannot be circular. A circular demonstration is no demonstration at all.  You cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. You are of course free to presuppose anything you like. You can even presuppose naturalism and then 'argue': it is true because it is true, and then try to account for everything is naturalistic terms.

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32 responses to “Naturalism, Ultimate Explanation, and Brute Facts and Laws”

  1. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Hi Bill,
    Thanks for having a look at this paper.
    On my reading, what Bogardus is getting at is that, while of course one can in principle abandon an explanatory regress with brute facts wherever one likes (“Turtle #1 rests on Turtle #2, and Turtle #2 rests on Turtle #3, but Turtle #3 is just there, and that’s all that can be said about it”), such an approach undermines the haughty claims of Naturalism to be able, at least in principle, to explain the world on Naturalism’s own terms.
    As Bogardus writes (p. 6):

    Whether this turtle explains why the Earth is stationary depends on whether there’s any explanation of how this turtle remains stationary. For suppose [one] says, ‘No, there is no further explanation. The turtle rests on nothing.’ I suggest that the promise of an explanation of the stationary Earth has merely been deferred, but ultimately not fulfilled. A bit of argument in support of this suggestion goes like this: insofar as there’s a connection between explanation and understanding – as Woodward (2019) puts it, ‘One ordinarily thinks of an explanation as something that provides understanding’ – this explanation has failed, since we’re not in a position to understand why the Earth is stationary. So, if there’s no explanation of the turtle’s stable position, it turns out that we have, in the end, no explanation of the Earth’s stable position.

    I think a key point for Bogardus is that a brute fact is not simply a fact with an explanation we don’t know yet, but rather one that actually has no explanation at all — and that the things that make up the furniture of the Naturalist’s universe are not the sort of things that can explain themselves on their own terms. (Bogardus develops this angle quite well, I think, in pages 9 to 12 of his paper.)
    Bogardus is arguing, then, that Naturalism is too “zoomed in” to be acceptable as a truly exhaustive explanatory metaphysics, because ultimately its “explanations”, as practical as they may be within their limited scope, categorically and arbitrarily exclude everything upon which they might ultimately be grounded.
    Related: Patrick Flynn, Must Every Explanation Be Explained?

    Reply
  2. Stephen Maitzen Avatar
    Stephen Maitzen

    “And let us suppose, with Bogardus, that such explanations cannot be…infinitely regressive…”.
    Sections 4.2-4.3 of this book explain why they not only can but must be infinitely regressive. Only because they’re infinitely regressive do they leave nothing unexplained that needs explaining.

    Reply
  3. BV Avatar
    BV

    Malcolm writes
    >>such an approach undermines the haughty claims of Naturalism to be able, at least in principle, to explain the world on Naturalism’s own terms.<< Which of the naturalists that Bogardus cites makes this haughty claim? My definition of naturalism is closest to Oppy's: "naturalism is the view that: (a) science is our touchstone for identifying the denizens of causal reality; and (b) there are none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal powers" But I would say that naturalism is the ontological thesis (b) whereas (a) is the epistemology of naturalism, i.e., scientism. Naturalism for me is the claim that all of reality is exhausted by causal reality provided that causation is understood as event-causation and not agent-causation. On this definition, naturalism takes no stance on the status of abstract objects. A wider definition is offered by D. M. Armstrong: the whole of reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents, with the task of science being to determine what these contents are (particles, fields, vacuum fluctuations, whatever). No fair-minded definition of 'naturalism' can rule out brute facts since whether or not there are brute facts is quite obviously not a matter of definition.

    Reply
  4. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Bill, I think that in my comment above I’m probably not really addressing your objection. Perhaps there’s really no compelling rejoinder that can be made.
    What I hear Bogardus saying is that brute facts, however deeply they are buried, explain nothing; he is saying that if we wish to have a metaphysics that truly makes the world understandable, then it just isn’t good enough to rest on things that are brutally inexplicable — that, ultimately, burying the inexplicable at the deepest levels of physics and cosmology is really no different from when our parents cut us off with “because I said so!”.
    What Bogardus is saying is not that brute facts might not be real — perhaps they are! — but that if that’s all that undergirds scientific “explanation”, then naturalistic science hasn’t really helped us get any closer to what we seek when we yearn for fundamental “understanding”, however advanced our practical understanding may become.
    Shall we be engineers, or philosophers? Can the philosopher really rest comfortably on a brute fact (you make it clear, Bill that you can’t), or on an infinity of turtles?

    Reply
  5. BV Avatar
    BV

    >>I think a key point for Bogardus is that a brute fact is not simply a fact with an explanation we don’t know yet,<< Who said that they were, Malcolm. Not me! I defined a brute fact as a fact that exists or obtains without cause or reason. If so, brute facts have no causal or teleological explanation. And of course you understand that from the mere definition one cannot conclude that there are, or that there not, any brute facts. >>but rather one that actually has no explanation at all — and that the things that make up the furniture of the Naturalist’s universe are not the sort of things that can explain themselves on their own terms.<< That's not quite right since surely some facts can be explained in terms of other facts. No one would claim that every fact is a brute fact.

    Reply
  6. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Bill,

    “Which of the naturalists that Bogardus cites makes this haughty claim?”

    Perhaps none specifically cited by Bogardus, but it is hardly a claim with which we are unfamiliar. It is a tent-pole of orthodox naturalism that, for example, teleology is no part of reality.

    “Who said that they were, Malcolm. Not me!”

    No, of course not you, Bill.
    And yes: of course some, perhaps nearly all, facts can be explained in terms of other facts.
    But what matters here is what we really mean by “explanation”. Has a model of reality that builds an elaborate explanatory structure resting ultimately on the inexplicable really given anything like a satisfactory “explanation” of why things are the way they are, and not wholly otherwise?

    Reply
  7. BV Avatar
    BV

    Malcolm,
    You seem to think that a fact F1 can explain fact F2 only if either F1 is explained by some fact other than it (in which case F1 is not brute) or F1 is self-explanatory (in which case F1 is not brute). I don’t see it. Why can’t F1 be a brute fact?
    What I am saying is that there are genuine causal explanations even if some facts are brute.
    Why is it that only non-brute facts can play an explanatory role?
    It seems that that there are only three ways to get rid of ‘brutality’: either by an actually infinite regress in which no fact goes unexplained by some earlier or deeper fact; or by a circular arrangement of facts in which every fact is explained by some prior fact; or by a necessary fact the necessity of which renders it non-brute. Suppose the existence of God is the Necessary Fact. That would give us the complete understanding we both want. But now the problem becomes: how do we prove the existence of God, who is necessary in himself from the contingent facts that we must start from.
    I’ll try to explain the difficulty in a separate post.

    Reply
  8. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Fair enough, Bill. I’m stuck, though (along with Bogardus, it seems), with the intuition that an explanatory stack needs, ultimately, to rest on something that requires no further explanation (something self-evidently true, non-contingent, or self-explanatory). In particular, it seems unsatisfying to have the entire edifice of scientific “explanation” of the natural world supported only by some intrinsically inexplicable fact about the natural world itself.
    But I must admit that these are just temperamental objections. That I find such explanations “unsatisfying” proves nothing.
    I must ask you, though: you say in your post that you “reject” brute facts, so it seems you share this intuition. On what analytical basis do you reject them?

    Reply
  9. Dmitri Avatar
    Dmitri

    I think it is not a coincidence that Bogardus’ paper — despite richly referencing many philosophers of science who worked on theories of scientific explanation — does not mention approaches to the subject matter which do not rely on his key point “(1) Any scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity.” Doing otherwise could ruin his argument from the outset.
    I’ll mention just one glaring omission — Anscombe’s “Causality and Determination” paper from 1971 where she, in my opinion, persuasively shakes the thesis above. She distinguishes between causation and determination and argues that Humean and, similar in this context, approaches of “no natural laws, no causal explanations” are confused because they are mistaking the two concepts.
    So, in a sense, Bogardus (like many others in the regularities/natural laws schools of thought) does not consider at all a simple, intuitively appealing and strong objection to his postulate.
    Here is the last paragraph of her article:
    Even a philosopher acute enough to be conscious of this, such as Davidson, will say, without offering any reason at all for saying it, that a singular causal statement implies that there is such a true universal proposition — though perhaps we can never have knowledge of it. Such a thesis needs some reason for believing it! “Regularities in nature”: that is not a reason. The most neglected of the key topics in this subject are: interference and prevention.

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  10. Richard Norris Avatar
    Richard Norris

    Bill,
    Both the theist and the naturalist seem to err where they conceive of Deity as a structural explanation. You and everyone else here in the combox can check out a recent post by Peter Hubbner on this. Noopositive.substack.com

    Reply
  11. BV Avatar
    BV

    Malcolm,
    In response to your 9:41 comment, I do share your intuition, that, as you well put it, >>an explanatory stack needs, ultimately, to rest on something that requires no further explanation (something self-evidently true, non-contingent, or self-explanatory).<< One quibble: the stack cannot rest on something true if truth is a property of propositions and propositions are abstract entities. We or at least I do not want to say that concrete causal reality rests on something abstract. The ultimate explanans cannot be a proposition, although Bogardus speaks of explanantia and explananda as propositions.
    You then ask the right follow-up: On what basis do I reject brute facts? I deal with the question in a published article and a published book. But I will touch upon it in a separate post before long. (A lot of mundane hassles at the moment, including the infernal revenue service.) Unfortunately, I now suspect that the argument I gave has a hole in it.

    Reply
  12. BV Avatar
    BV

    Dmitri,
    Thanks for the stimulating comment. Anscombe’s paper is indeed brilliant. Let us suppose that she is right that there are cases of causation in which the event sequence f – g is not an instance of an exceptionless generalization along the lines of “Whenever an F-type event occurs, it is followed in time by a spatially contiguous G-type event.”
    Suppose that the root notion of cause is not captured by the notion of regular succession, but that “causality [causation] consists in the derivativeness of an effect from its causes.” (Coll Phil Papers II, 136)
    Suppose all that. Bogardus might respond to your criticism by saying that he is talking about scientific EXPLANATION and not about causation, and this despite the fact that scientific explanations are causal explanations.
    There may well be causal event sequences that instantiate no regularity. Bogardus might grant the point but insist that a scientific explanations must be general.

    Reply
  13. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Bill,

    “One quibble: the stack cannot rest on something true if truth is a property of propositions and propositions are abstract entities. We or at least I do not want to say that concrete causal reality rests on something abstract.”

    “In the beginning was the Word…”

    Reply
  14. Dmitri Avatar
    Dmitri

    Hi Bill
    Winning arguments by redefining the key concepts is, sadly, a frequent but invalid practice. Scientific explanations come in many forms and selectively ignoring this fact and also neglecting to mention directly relevant high quality philosophical literature like Bogardus does is bad enough.
    But even in physics, which is the hardest of the natural sciences, explanations are not bound to involve laws and many times they don’t as they invoke singular causes just like Anscombe suggested in her paper more generally. I don’t want to bore you and your readers, but for those interested, I’d recommend the paper of Nancy Cartwright from 2000: An empiricist defence of singular causes. In Roger Teichmann, Logic, Cause and Action: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Anscombe. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 47-58. This paper discusses actual examples from physics and shows the crucial role actual experiments play in scientific explanations as opposed to citing this or that law.
    Informally, it is quite clear to me that Bogardus’ conception of scientific explanations owes a great deal to Carl Hempel’s nomologico-deductive model that is considered outdated not so much chronologically but scientifically and philosophically, much like the logical positivism itself. Van Fraassen, Cartwright and other philosophers of science with strong scientific, historical and philosophical backgrounds argued against this simplistic model from many directions and convincingly so.

    Reply
  15. BV Avatar
    BV

    Malcolm,
    So are you saying that the Word (Logos, Verbum dei) referred to at the beginning of the Gospel of John is an abstract object?
    Yes or no, and then tell me what you understand by ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete.’

    Reply
  16. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Hi Bill,
    Yes, I hesitated before posting that! But I’m not really staking out a position; I just thought it would be interesting to throw it out there.
    I think of abstract objects as things that exist outside of, or prior to, space-time and physical reality, or exist only in minds. Might not Logos, as the rational, ordering principle of the world, have these qualities? (I understand “concrete” to refer to physical things; things that can be detected by the senses.)
    I do realize that objections could be made to thinking of what John referred to as “the Word” as an abstract object (although it is certainly prior to physical reality), in terms of universals vs. particulars, and as regards whether or not abstract objects can enter into causal relations.
    But if, in order to avoid circularity or bruteness, the explanation stack for the natural world needs to rest on something outside the physical, then the Word, perhaps, seems to build the right sort of bridge, whether or not it is precisely correct to think of it as “abstract”.
    As an aside: do Naturalists believe that abstract objects really exist? If so, what do they think brought them into existence? For the theist, on the other hand, don’t they exist as ideas in the mind of God? And if so, aren’t they rather like the Word?

    Reply
  17. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Bill & Malcolm:
    >>Malcolm, So are you saying that the Word (Logos, Verbum dei) referred to at the beginning of the Gospel of John is an abstract object? Yes or no, and then tell me what you understand by ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete.’<< F A Hayek defined the concrete and the abstract in a way I always found interesting. In Kinds of Order in Society (1964) he states that the concrete is that which is given to "observation by our senses" and characteristically will contain "still more properties … to be discovered than we already know or have perceived." The abstract on the other hand "possesses a limited number of attributes." This gave me pause at first; a cat seems to be a simple object in the world, easily identified, whereas the abstract concept of a cat is complex, requiring effort to learn the various biological indicia. But then I realized that the concept of a cat is indeed a limited number of attributes, whereas a particular cat, my cat, has properties that go beyond the concept: peculiar eating & sleeping habits; an eccentric but curiously attractive purr; lopsided whiskers and odd-eye colors; and many more that mark her as my particular cat. On that set of definitions, the Word, attested by John as the man Jesus, would be concrete, possessed of an unlimited number of abstract properties, including those of Divine origin. As such, the Word would satisfy Bill's concern that concrete causal reality should not rest on an abstraction while also supporting Malcolm's "right sort of bridge" between the natural world and "something outside the physical." Of course, the Word is an absolutely unique concrete object, possessed of incompatible, contradictory, and outright paradoxical properties, so there might still be some with reservations about the matter.

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  18. BV Avatar
    BV

    Malcolm writes,
    >>I think of abstract objects as things that exist outside of, or prior to, space-time and physical reality, or exist only in minds.<< Very good, except that if abstract objects are outside of space-time, then you should say 'logically prior' rather than 'prior.' Obviously, something outside of space-time cannot be temporally prior to space-time. You also rightly allude to the difference between the new way of using abstract, which we can blame on Quine, and the old use according to which abstracta derive from the mental process of abstraction. >> Might not Logos, as the rational, ordering principle of the world, have these qualities? (I understand “concrete” to refer to physical things; things that can be detected by the senses.)<< John says that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. But if God = the Word (Logos), then the Word cannot exist "only in minds" and so cannot be abstract in the second sense you mention. I would add that the Word cannot be abstract in the first sense either since abstract objects in the first sense are causally inert, i.e., neither causally active nor causally passive. Now God = the Word is impassible: he cannot be acted upon, but he can and does act, and 'do things,' such as create creatures, and once he has created a world of creatures, intervene in its operations, by suspending laws of nature and bringing it about that a virgin gives birth. So if abstracta are causally inert, then God is not an abstract item, although he is, classically, eternal and 'outside' of the time as opposed to omnitemporal. So I would say that God = the Word, is concrete if we must assign him to one box or the other. If so, and the concrete is defined as all and only the causally active/passive, then 'concrete' subsumes more than physical things, things detectable by the senses, as you put it. Here are some definitions we can play with. x is Quine-abstract =df (i) x exists mind-independently apart from space-time-matter; (ii) x is causally inert. x is classically-abstract =df x has no extramental existence, but exists only in a mind M as a product of an abstractive operation performed by M. x is concrete =df x is possibly such that it is a term of a causal relation, either as cause or as effect, or both.

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  19. BV Avatar
    BV

    Tom T,
    Thanks for bringing in Hayek: >> the concrete is that which is given to “observation by our senses” and characteristically will contain “still more properties … to be discovered than we already know or have perceived.” The abstract on the other hand “possesses a limited number of attributes.”<< That's good as far as it goes. Meso-particulars (middle-sized particulars) in the material world are, I should think, all of them observable by the senses, in some cases with the aid of instruments such as telescopes. The tree in the backyard for example. It doesn't have just the properties I see it to have: it is infinitely-propertied and as such wholly determinate: with respect to every property, relational of non-relational, it either has it or its complement. My concept of the tree, however, cannot include every property of the tree, or a conceptual sub-representation of every property of the tree due to the finitude of our minds. My concept abstracts away from many of the tree's properties and is in that sense abstract. Now when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the eternal Word, Logos, Second person of the Trinity, entered time and history and somehow became identical to a particular man, Jesus of Nazareth. Given my defn of 'concrete' above, what happened in the Incarnation is that one concretum, the eternal Word, somehow became identical to a sublunary concretum, the man Jesus. Both concreta are wholly determinate and neither is abstract. So we don't need the Incarnation to make the eternal Word concrete, if that is what you are saying, Tom.

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  20. BV Avatar
    BV

    Gentlemen,
    I said: “The ultimate explanans cannot be a proposition, although Bogardus speaks of explanantia and explananda as propositions.”
    I find that puzzling if propositions are abstract in either of the senses I defined above.
    Suppose it is turtles all the way down until you reach a proposition which ends the regress. That makes no sense to me. Turtles are concreta. How can the last turtle rest on a non-turtle which is also abstract, hence not concrete? An explainer cannot be proposition; it has to be a cause, whether an event or a potent particular.
    At that point Malcolm brought up the Word of God. But the Verbum dei = Deus on Trinitarian orthodoxy, and God is no abstract object: he is neither a concept in a mind, nor causally inert. He’s potent, omnipotent. He has power; on DDS he is power itself. Notbing abstract has power.

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  21. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    To Bill, Dmitri,
    I think, Bill, because Bogardus is operating on something like “Carl Hempel’s nomologico-deductive model” as Dmitri points out at 3/19, 2:18 pm. In this, Bogardus’s focus is not on the explananda but the explanantia as the primary work of the scientist. This leads him to posit science as a series of explanatory propositions, which on your take, are abstracta with no causal power. Bogardus misses, it seems, that the scientific enterprise is focused on the concrete material objects and events, and each iteration of an explanation is a response to the turtle of the concrete objects/events. Bogardus is taking the explanation series as ungrounded (and therefore violative of Prop 2), when in fact they are a series of approximations intentionally grounded in the concrete material objects/events. Dmitri again: Bogardus misses the “crucial role actual experiments play in scientific explanations as opposed to citing this or that law.”

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  22. BV Avatar
    BV

    Insightful comment, Tom. That is what I was driving at. Explanation and causation are different relations, and causal explanations must be ground in concrete causes. The point is well-made by Jaegwon Kim, “Explanatory Realism, Causal Realism, and Explanatory Exclusion,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 12 (1987), 225-239.

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  23. T Bogardus Avatar
    T Bogardus

    Dear Dr. Vallicella,
    Thank you for your interest in my paper, and for taking the time to discuss it with your readers. I hope you don’t mind my chiming in to clarify a few things (hopefully) and say a few words in my defense.
    I gather that most of your concerns have to do with my second premise:
    2. Any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one.
    For example, you asked, “Is Bogardus assuming that a genuine explanation must be or involve an ultimate explanation? And if he is making that assumption, is the assumption true?”
    My answer to your question depends on what exactly the question means. Later, you give one interpretation of the question: “Must I explain everything to explain anything?” And you give an example of Farmer John, whose crops have failed. Because of the drought. You ask, “have I not explained the crop failure by just saying that that drought caused it?”
    I consider a similar case on page 6 of the article, a case having to do with explaining the stability of the Earth by positing a stationary turtle beneath it, holding it up. Wouldn’t that stationary turtle explain why the Earth is stable? In the text, I say: evidently, it depends.
    “Whether this turtle explains why the Earth is stationary depends on whether there’s any explanation of how this turtle remains stationary. For suppose the man says, ‘No, there is no further explanation. The turtle rests on nothing.’ I suggest that the promise of an explanation of the stationary Earth has merely been deferred, but ultimately not fulfilled. A bit of argument in support of this suggestion goes like this: insofar as there’s a connection between explanation and understanding – as Woodward (2019) puts it, ‘One ordinarily thinks of an explanation as something that provides understanding’ – this explanation has failed, since we’re not in a position to understand why the Earth is stationary.”
    I say a little more in this regard when I consider a couple of counterexamples in endnote 18. I hope you don’t mind if I reproduce that note in full:
    ———————————————————-
    Objection: Suppose a full-grown, pregnant mare appears before you, from nothing, with literally no explanation. The mare foals a colt. Surely, you can successfully explain the origin of the colt in terms of the pregnant mare, even if the pregnant mare herself has no explanation, yet calls out for one. This is a counterexample to premise 2. Or suppose a meal appears before you, from nothing, with no explanation. You eat it, satisfying your hunger. Surely, you can now successfully explain your satiety by reference to the meal you ate, even if that meal itself has no explanation, yet calls out for one. This is another counterexample.
    Response: I deny that I would have a successful explanation of the colt or of the satiety. Recall the link between explanation and understanding. A successful explanation can produce in us understanding of the phenomenon, an understanding of why or how it’s happening. But if there’s part of a proposed explanation that cannot be understood, because it’s brute – how can it produce in us understanding of why or how the phenomenon is happening? Yet if it cannot produce in us that understanding, then it isn’t a successful explanation. In each of these cases, there is a part of the proposed explanation that cannot be understood – in the first, the mare, in the second, the meal – and, so, in neither case do we have a successful explanation. To put it another way, to understand why (or how) is to understand an acceptable answer to the relevant ‘Why?’ (or ‘How?’) question. But if part of that answer is unintelligible, unable to be understood, totally mysterious, then one cannot understand the answer. And, in that case, one cannot understand why (or how) the phenomenon is happening. But, if so, then these answers cannot be successful explanations. In that case, they are not counterexamples to premise 2, despite appearances.
    But why do they appear to be counterexamples? I believe these cases are attractive because they feature explanans that are of types with which we’re very familiar, and we’re tempted to assimilate these cases to our background knowledge and experience of similar cases. We’re familiar with eating, and we’re familiar with birth. In ordinary cases of explanation – including cases of eating, and cases of birth – we tend to cut short our explanations, with an implicit ‘and so on’ clause. Why am I at this very moment satiated? I just ate quinoa and salmon. It’s presupposed, in the vast majority of conversational contexts, that such a meal would have an ordinary provenance, and so, for convenience and efficiency, the explicit explanation ends there. ‘And so on, in an ordinary way’, we tacitly assume. My suggestion is that we mistakenly carry this habit with us when considering the proposed cases above. When we hear the colt came from the mare, we’re inclined to think this is a sufficient explanation, because in ordinary cases, where ordinary presuppositions are met, it would be. Ordinarily, we could perfectly well understand a pregnant mare, or a meal on a table before us. But these are not ordinary cases. They feature explanans that are brute, that literally have no explanation, and that, therefore, cannot be understood. These unintelligible explanans create, as it were, mysterious gaps, or holes, in their respective proposed explanations, gaps that our minds are disposed to fill in so as to resemble ordinary cases, just as our minds fill in the blind spots in our visual fields, created by our optic nerves. But make this unintelligibility more explicit, more salient, and the temptation to think we have a successful explanation diminishes. For example, a high-velocity brick appears out of nowhere, for no reason, and flies through a window: do we really understand why the window is broken? I don’t think so. A falling domino materializes from nowhere, for no reason, and knocks over a second domino. Do we really understand why that second domino fell? Again, I don’t think so. A world where things like this happened regularly would be a mysterious world, a regularly inexplicable world. But this is the sort of thing that is happening with the mare and the meal. And, so, as I said above, these are not cases of successful explanation, and therefore not counterexamples.
    ———————————————————-
    So, your question was, “Must I explain everything to explain anything?” And my answer is: No, you needn’t have access to the full explanation in order for some phenomenon to be explained. And you needn’t have access to the full explanation in order to satisfy pragmatic requirements on a successful explanation in ordinary (or even scientific) conversation. You say the crops failed because of the drought, and we accept that, because we “fill in the rest,” as it were.
    What I do claim is that, as premise 2 says, any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks one. I clarify this a bit in endnote 15: “By ‘but lacks one’, I don’t mean merely that we don’t know what the explanation for this element would be, or that it’s not available to us, or some such constraint on our epistemic access to an explanation. I mean that there is literally no explanation to be had.”
    So, that’s the claim. You then, quite reasonably, wonder about this: “Why can’t scientific explanations end with brute laws and brute facts? Has Bogardus given us an argument against brute laws?” You see that I do offer some reasons for premise (2), but you say this: “Bogardus tries to argue for (2), but I don’t see that he succeeds in giving us a non-question-begging reason to accept (2).”
    I’ll reproduce the argument for the benefit of your readers who may not access the text. This is from pages 5-6:
    ———————————————————-
    Imagine we lived in a pre-scientific age, and we wondered how the Earth remained stationary beneath our feet. Why isn’t it falling, or rising, or otherwise moving around? One possibility is that there is no explanation of this fact; the Earth is stationary, and that’s the end of the story. Our inquiry finds no satisfaction here. But suppose we meet a man who offers this explanation: the Earth is stationary because it rests on the back of a stationary turtle. Now, it may seem as though this would explain why the Earth is stationary: it’s held in place by that stable turtle, bless him. But, evidently, it depends. Whether this turtle explains why the Earth is stationary depends on whether there’s any explanation of how this turtle remains stationary. For suppose the man says, ‘No, there is no further explanation. The turtle rests on nothing.’ I suggest that the promise of an explanation of the stationary Earth has merely been deferred, but ultimately not fulfilled. A bit of argument in support of this suggestion goes like this: insofar as there’s a connection between explanation and understanding – as Woodward (2019) puts it, ‘One ordinarily thinks of an explanation as something that provides understanding’ – this explanation has failed, since we’re not in a position to understand why the Earth is stationary. So, if there’s no explanation of the turtle’s stable position, it turns out that we have, in the end, no explanation of the Earth’s stable position. For the same reason, adding another turtle to hold up the first turtle won’t help, if that second turtle’s position has no further explanation. And this goes no matter how many turtles we put down there, at least so long as that number is finite. (For the infinite case, see below.)
    Again, the general principle we’re considering in this section is this: for any phenomenon P, any putative explanation E of P can be successful only if E does not crucially involve any element that calls out for explanation but lacks one. And it looks as though, in this case at least, the putative explanation (the support of the turtle) of the phenomenon (the stationary Earth) fails, because the putative explanation crucially involves some element that is itself unexplained (in this case, the turtle’s stable position). There seems to be nothing unusual about this instance of the general principle currently under consideration, and the reader can easily supply more. So, we have here the makings of a proof for the universal generalization that is our second premise. If such a principle can be shown to hold with any randomly chosen example, it holds for any example.
    ———————————————————-
    Now, does this argument beg the question? I suppose the question was whether premise (2) is true, no? Did I assume that premise (2) is true in arguing for premise (2)? That would be pretty bad, I admit. But I don’t think I did. I think I presented a concrete case, in order to elicit some intuitions from my readers. One intuition I meant to elicit is this: “I suggest that the promise of an explanation of the stationary Earth has merely been deferred, but ultimately not fulfilled.” Another is this: “we’re not in a position to understand why the Earth is stationary.”
    And doesn’t that seem right? If I’m not in a position to understand why the Earth is stationary when there is literally no explanation of that fact, how does it help to add a turtle when that turtle has literally no explanation? As I say in the text, I think this merely defers the promised explanation, but ultimately does not fulfill that promise.
    I admit that not every reader will share these intuitions. Nevertheless, I think it’s a reasonable place to rest an argument. I think Kripke was right when he said, in Naming and Necessity, “Of course, some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive
    evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking.”
    But even if not every reader shares these intuitions, or thinks that intuition is not a reasonable ground on which to rest an argument, I hope we can agree that this little argument I gave is not question-begging.
    And I’m optimistic that you actually share this intuition. In a comment in response to Malcolm, you said this: “In response to your 9:41 comment, I do share your intuition, that, as you well put it, >>an explanatory stack needs, ultimately, to rest on something that requires no further explanation (something self-evidently true, non-contingent, or self-explanatory).<<” But, then, haven’t we agreed? If we haven’t, perhaps you could help me see the remaining points of disagreement. Thank you again for the time and attention you’ve given to this paper. I’m a long-time reader/admirer, first-time commenter haha. Take care. -Tomas

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  24. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Thank you all for this excellent comment-thread, which I have now been watching from the sidelines. (I’m still very keen to hear on what basis you reject brute facts, Bill, when you have the time.)
    I appreciate the point about science being a practical enterprise based on experiment and causal models, and I think that’s fine, within the boundaries and limits appropriate to such an approach.
    I do think, though, that this way of looking at scientific “explanation” undercuts any authority science has for insisting on a naturalistic metaphysics, and yet most scientists seem (to put it mildly!) to have no qualms about doing so.

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  25. BV Avatar
    BV

    Malcolm,
    I’ll try to post something on brute facts before too long.
    The natural sciences enjoy great prestige and they deserve it. Their truth claims are proven by technological implementation. The incredible engineering feats of Elon Musk and his team would not be possible if the underlying science were not putting us in touch with physical reality. But you and I agree that one cannot conclude from the success of science that the only knowledge is scientific knowledge (scientism) or that reality is exhausted by the spacetime system and its contents (naturalism).

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  26. BV Avatar
    BV

    Dear Dr. Bogardus,
    I just now found your comment in the ‘spam corral.’ Why it got sent there I have no idea. Thank you for commenting. I hope to read and respond later in the day.
    As you can see, your carefully crafted article proved stimulating indeed.
    All the best,
    BV

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  27. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Thanks also, Dr. Bogardus, for joining the discussion; your comment had not been posted yet when I submitted mine yesterday evening.
    As a philosophical amateur and “civilian”, I’m grateful to you all for your guidance in exploring this perplexing question.

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  28. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Bill,
    In reply to your 3/25, 8:38 am comment: Thanks. I was preparing one of my painfully long critiques of Bogardus on just that point when Dmitri jumped in, providing a welcome concision.

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  29. Dmitri Avatar
    Dmitri

    I was focusing on the problematic assumption #1 in the article which unfortunately is not covered in Dr Bogardus’ kind response to the comments here.
    With regards to #2 and his colourful examples which, according to Dr B, appear like but are not really counterexamples to it, I can’t share the intuition behind the argument to accept them as intuitively plausible. We definitely have an explanation of how the colt came about. We do not have an explanation of how the mare came about. These are two different questions and science is full of similar cases — having theories and experiments explaining some phenomena but not managing to explain others which cry for explanation but sometimes figure in explanations themselves. A partial quick list: fundamental constants, particles, gravity — all of these are used in explanations that are used in successful predictions as well. All of these are, in an important analogical sense, mares that popped out of nowhere using Dr B’s illustration. But assuming their existence successfully and scientifically explains a bunch of otherwise puzzling phenomena.
    The bottom line is that Dr B’s approach deprives, by stipulation and reliance on problematic re-interpretations of key concepts in his argument, many scientific theories and experiments of their explanatory validity.

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  30. T Bogardus Avatar
    T Bogardus

    Hi Dimitri,
    You said, “A partial quick list: fundamental constants, particles, gravity — all of these are used in explanations that are used in successful predictions as well.”
    You can probably successfully predict my reply! Whether these are really used in (successful) explanations *depends* on whether they themselves have a deeper explanation. To the degree that we unreflectively accept that they serve in successful explanations, we assume there is some deeper explanation. But if we consider the possibility that these fundamental constants are unexplained, mysterious “frozen accidents” as Paul Davies puts it, we should conclude that the proposed explanations they appear in are not *real* explanations, are not successful. They do not produce understanding, dispelling all mystery.
    Suppose an orange appears on my doorstep every Wednesday morning. Quite mysterious! Perhaps that’s a brute fact, with no deeper explanation. If so, I guess we’d conclude we live in a mysterious universe, one impervious to complete explanation. But now suppose we learn there’s a law of nature to the effect that, every Wednesday, an orange appears on my doorstep. And this law of nature is itself unexplained.
    Did the universe become more comprehensible, would you say? I myself would say: on the contrary, the mystery has only increased!
    Now do the same with e.g. fundamental properties of fundamental particles. This electron has a -1 charge. How strange! I wonder why! Proposed Answer: EVERY electron has that charge, as a matter of nomic necessity. Mystery solved? No, in my opinion, the mystery has only increased. If there’s no further explanation of this law, I’d say we live in a deeply mysterious universe, one that’s impervious to complete explanation. Or, I daresay, to any explanation at all, at least when electrons are involved.
    Or so I try to argue in that paper, anyway. Thanks for the interest in it, and for the feedback.
    -Tomas

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  31. Tom T. Avatar
    Tom T.

    Dmitri
    >>Dr B’s approach deprives … many scientific theories and experiments of their explanatory validity.<< I don't think Dr Bogardus is denying the explanatory validity of science, although his complicated argument seems to suggest that. The confusion for me is his choice of the word "successful." In the context of his argument, "successful" does not mean valid; it means "complete and unconditional." That is, Naturalism purports to be an absolute metaphysic, and as such, it must present complete and unconditional explanations for everything it encompasses. Anything less and it is unsuccessful, i.e., incomplete and conditional. So, where do scientific explanations come into his argument? Here is my skeleton of Dr B's argument, which may or may not track his more sophisticated and impressive scholarship on this matter. But it does sort out my own various confusions. In a straightforward sense, Naturalism encompasses the same cosmos that science does, the concrete natural phenomena and their relations. With identical objects, it is a reasonable assumption that science exhausts all the possible explanations in Naturalism about concrete natural phenomena. So if scientific explanations are incomplete and conditional, then so is Naturalism. As you and Dr B show, scientific explanations are full of mares popping out of nowhere (together with a whole lot of turtles), which means scientific explanations, although valid, are not complete and unconditional. Therefore, Naturalism is not complete and unconditional, and it has no further resources with which to cure itself or science of their deficiencies. Ergo, if Naturalism is true, then science is impossible - an intentionally provocative but consistent conclusion, if the demand is for complete and unconditional explanations. If I am anywhere close to what Dr B is arguing, then I think he makes a good case that, to the extent we feel a need for ultimate explanations (as I do), then we must look elsewhere than an absolutist Naturalism metaphysic. Which brings us back to the Word …

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  32. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Tom T,
    That’s exactly how I understood Dr. Bogardus’s purpose as well, and is why I brought his paper to our host’s attention.

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