Elly Vintiadis, Constantin Mekios (eds): Brute Facts, Emergence, and Scientific Explanation
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Elly Vintiadis, Constantin Mekios (eds): Brute Facts, Emergence, and Scientific Explanation Brute Facts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2018 (ISBN: 978-0-19875860-0) (Hardback), 288 Pages, Price: £50 (Hardback), £35.63 (eBook) Max Kistler 1 Accepted: 12 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
According to Leibniz, every truth has an explanation, by virtue of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), according to which “nothing happens without a reason why it should be so, rather than otherwise” (Monadology, §32, quoted by Vintiadis, p. 3). If everything has a “sufficient reason”, and if a fact is brute if and only if it has no explanation, it might seem to follow that there are no brute facts. The 14 contributions to the collection Brute Facts, edited by Elly Vintiadis and Constantin Mekios, provide a wide range of deep and sophisticated philosophical reflections on the limits of scientific explanation. If, as John Symons argues in his contribution to the book, there is no good reason to accept the PSR as a universal metaphysical truth, although it is a useful methodological and heuristic principle, we are faced with the baffling and fascinating possibility that some facts are brute. Explanations are arguments produced by human subjects in particular circumstances. Facts that do not have an explanation in a given historical context, and are thus “epistemically brute”, may nevertheless be explained later on, thanks to scientific progress. One is naturally led to ask whether some facts are absolutely brute rather than only relatively to a particular historical context. Are there “ontologically brute facts” (p. 2) that could not possibly ever be explained? While it may be unhappy to call them “ontologically unexplainable” (p. 2), the notion of such absolutely brute facts is explored in metaphysical terms by various authors in the book, by construing them (as Torin Alter) as ungrounded facts or (as Dana Goswick) as fundamental facts. Here is an example of the sophisticated and deep philosophical thoughts provided by the authors of the book. It is often assumed that explanation is inseparable from understanding so that ontologically brute facts cannot possibly be understood. According to Hempel and Oppenheim’s deductive-nomological model of explanation, an explanation provides understanding for a given fact by showing that there is a logically valid argument whose conclusion * Max Kistler mkistler@univ–paris1.fr
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Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & CNRS, IHPST - Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (UMR 8590), 13 rue du Four, 75006 Paris, France
M. Kistler
is a proposition expressing this fact. On this model, brute facts cannot be explained because there are no more fundamental premises from which they could be derived. However, Peter Wyss challenges the equivalence of lack of explanation and lack of understanding: learning that something is a brute fact yields understanding. We know more when we know that there is no explanation to be found. A large part of the book is dedi
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