The Status of 'Brute Facts'

Disregarding any theory that posited 'brute facts' - excepting 'identity' - used to be a common thread throughout my philosophical career. As any good Leibnizian, I am deeply committed to some form of the Principle of Sufficient Reason afterall. But as my thinking about metaphysics becomes more and more naturalized, I find myself not only denying this practice but also finding it just plain mistaken metaphysics.

Granted, it would be lovely if we could do away with 'brute facts'. But not only are there philosophical reasons for thinking this an impossible project - think: first mover - but there are good reasons for thinking that primitives ought to be had at a much 'higher level' of ontology. I for one, as a sortal essentialist, think that explanation stops at natural kind identities. So asking questions like "but why is this object this natural kind?" are not pointless, but metaphysically meaningless. You might as well be asking "but why is x identical to x?"

At the recent 'Philosophy of Cosmology' conference at St. Anne's College at the University of Oxford, Paul Davies gave an interesting talk. The gist was: we can always ask 'why' and physics may not always provide an answer. I approached him after his talk and asked him if he would ever be happy with primitives in physics, or philosophy for that matter. He insisted that the questions he raised were valid and important questions for physicists to ask themselves. Now, I agree with that, but I also recognize that there are primitives and then there are primitives. If we have a proposed primitive that is capable of theoretical reduction, then we have no primitive at all. But looking for contrastive reasons for every proposed primitive is, more often than not, a futile effort. In particular, Davies asked, "but why this law, rather than some other?"

I have recently been re-reading sections of Richard Swinburne's 'The Existence of God'. An amazing book to be sure, and there's no doubt that Professor Swinburne has done much to make theological belief intellectually credible. But in his chapter on 'The Nature of Explanation', he insists on these kinds of questions. In discussing the causal powers view of natural laws, he complains that '...the law does not explain why these substances have those powers'. But if these powers are the foundations for the natural laws - there just isn't any worth in asking such questions. If Swinburne is looking for an answer to "why negative charge repels negative charge, rather than attracting it", he is simply assuming that nature has available to it all of the content of the span of logically possible worlds. This is the only thing that can be going on in these types of questions: one must be a Humean about possibility.

If you think there's a meaningful answer to the question "why does negative charge repel negative charge, rather than attract it?", you must think that it is in fact possible that negative charge might have attracted other negative charges. But why think this? As far as I can tell, one would only think this by assuming that logical possibility is the possibility-space for the concrete world. But on a dispositional conception of possibility - to ask such a thing is to be asking a rather ad hoc question. For on this view, the causal powers themselves demarcate what is possible and what is not.

So there is simply no room to ask for any contrastive explanation as to why these powers are as they are. The short answer is: this is a brute fact about reality. And if you think that it is genuinely possible that like negative charges might have attracted, the onus is on you to explain why it is that purely logical possibilities should be countenanced as true de re possibilities for objects in the concrete world. And so you must make the dreaded conceivability entails possibility link.