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PHILOSOPHY 441 (METAPHYSICS)
SPRING 2006, WILBURN
LECTURE 2 (Burke, Rescher on ultimate “Why” questions)
Summary of last time? What I like about this book?
Part I: Existence
What is Burke’s and Rescher’s concern when they talk about existence?
Start with some points of clarification from the Burke piece. What is the issue,
what might an answer to it look like. Then we’ll turn to Rescher and look a specific
more developed account.
Burke’s qualifiers to help us understand the questions:
(1) Why is this a question about the existence of “concrete objects” rather than
abstract objects?
(2) Why does Burke say this: When we ask “Why is there something rather than
nothing” we necessarily use “is” in tenseless way? Why don’t we just mean, “Why
is there something now rather than nothing?”
(3) Why does Burke say this: When we ask "why" there is something rather than
nothing, we are asking for a reason, but not for any particular kind of reason?
So, that’s how Burke qualifies the question. Let’s canvass some possible types of
answers to see what’s been suggested historically before we go onto Rescher.
(1) Leibniz’ Theistic Response involving necessity and contingency.
What is it? What’s your reaction to it?
Rescer cites Kant in the next article:
“To have recourse to God as the Creator of all things in explaining the
arrangements of nature and their changes is at any rate not a scientific explanation,
but a complete confession that one has come to the end of his philosophy, since he
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is compelled to assume something [supernatural]. . . . to account for something he
sees before his very eyes.”
(2) “Hume-Edwards Response regarding the nature of complete explanation.
What is it? What’s your reaction to it?
Seems to leave the following concern unanswered: “Given that matter is
conserved, matter exists at all times if it exists at any. But why does it exist at
any?”
And Rescher has a response to it in the next article. Remember when he talks about
team members showing up for a game? What does he say?
Each member of the team is present because he was invited. Does that explain why
the team is present as a whole. . . Even when we have resolved the former issue, a
genuine explanatory question still remains.
“When we ask an explanatory question about a whole, we don't just want to know
about it as acollection of parts, but want to know about it holistically qua whole.
When we know why each particular day was rain-free (there were no rain clouds
about at that point) we still have not explained the occurrence of a drought. Here
we need something deeper—something that accounts for the entire Gestalt.”
(3) Quantum Cosmological Response: What is it? What’s your reaction to it?
“The universe began with an uncaused quantum change, from nothingness to a
cosmos, consisting of a tiny volume of space which then expanded.”
Here we don’t need a lot of the details. The explanation, for instance, of why the
expansion occurred. I don’t want to gas about “false vacuums” as though I know
what I’m talking about.
The only pertinent point is this: The laws of quantum physics provide for
spontaneous transitions within all physical systems. Extrapolating, it is reasonable
to suggest that the same laws provide for spontaneous transitions within
nothingness, which means transitions from nothing to something.
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Underlying idea here as to why this might be OK is that mathematically, nothing
really changes because the overall energy value of the system is zero -- expansive
energy is completely balanced out by contractive gravitational energy.
You don’t want to dismiss it as too speculative. There’s a lot speaking for it.
Historically, a lot of philosophical questions have only become intelligible in the
past because they were rephrased as scientific questions. Maybe this is one of
them.
(1) Quantum physics offers the only prospect we have for a naturalistic
explanation of the why question because it countenances untriggered events.
(2) It also countenances the spontaneous coming into being of entities—for
example, the appearance (followed generally by the quick disappearance) of
particles within very strong electromagnetic fields (this has actually been
observed).
So you might think this: The appearance of a universe out of nothing is no stranger
than other events which have already been countenanced by quantum physicists.
What are the possible limitations of this? They have to do with the notion of a
natural law.
It requires that certain conditions be met by natural laws. That laws be objective,
mind-independent features of reality that can be understood in terms that are prior
to reality.
So, if you think that natural laws are relations among properties you have
problems.
If you think that laws of nature originated with nature, you’ve got problems.
Quantum laws are formulated statistically, which invokes time. So if you think that
time is a feature of the world that came into existence with the world, you’ve got
problems.
So, this is just an initial canvassing. But it gives us an idea of the sort of thing that
we are looking for. What the problem is. What a solution to it might look like.
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Let’s now turn to Rescher (“On Explaining Existence”) for a more focused
treatment.
Rescher starts with his own taxonomy of different types of approaches to the
question. And this we can run down pretty quickly:
He says there are six broadly different kinds of approaches, some of which we’ve
looked at:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
theological
necessitarian
rejectionist
nomological
mystificational
acausal
Let’s start by looking at each of them, and not in this order.
THE MYSTIFICATIONAL APPROACH: What is the central idea here? Do
mystificationists deny that this is an intelligible question or that there is an
answer to it? (Colin McGinn)
So, what do you think of the mystificational approach?
4. THE ARATIONAL APPROACH: What is it? How is this different from
the mystificational approach?
Maintains that things exist "just because." It takes the stance that there
simply is no particular reason for existence.
Let’s give this a chance. It may not be completely stupid. I guess it asks
“why should we suppose that the existence of the universe requires a reason?
Why suppose that the default state of things is non-existence, so that
existence rather than non-existence is the thing that requires explanation?
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That seems like a legitimate question.
Rescher cites a debate between Bertrand Russell and Fred Copleston on
arguments from first cause:
“I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy. Every man who exists has a
mother. And it seems to me that your argument is that therefore the human
race must have a mother. But obviously the human race hasn't a mother—
that's a different logical sphere."
What’s Rescher’s response to this? Analogy: The causes of homo sapiens as a
species may not be of the same particular type as the cause of a particular person.
But that doesn’t mean that we cannot provide an account of the latter in terms of
evolutionary biology.
5. THE THEOLOGICAL APPROACH: This we’ve already looked at and
we’ve described Rescher’s sentiments.
6. THE NECESSITARIAN APPROACH: What is it? What do you think of
it?
The real problem here is this: How could the constraints of logic alone
possibly engender the arrangements of fact?
7. THE REJECTIONIST APPROACH: What is it? What do you think of it?
One example from Kant’s antinomies:
It is illegitimate to try to account for the phenomenal universe as a whole.
Explanation on this view is inherently partitive: phenomena can only be accounted for in terms of other phenomena, so that it is in principle improper
to ask for an account of phenomena-as-a-whole. The very idea of an explanatory science of nature-as-a-whole is illegitimate.
Why does Rescher think this objection is problematic?
It is in the course of responding to the rejectionist account that Rescher sets
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out to give his positive account. How does he do this?
What does he think is Henpel’s mistake in the following passage:
“Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? .. . But what kind of an
answer could be appropriate? What seems to be wanted is an explanatory
account which does not assume the existence of something or other. But
such an account, I would submit, is a logical impossibility. For generally, the
question "Why is it the case that A?" is answered by "Because B is the case"
. . . [Am answer to our riddle which made no assumptions about the
existence of anything cannot possibly provide adequate grounds. . . . The
riddle has been constructed in a manner that makes an answer logically
impossible. . . .”
What does Rescher mean when he says that this objection fails to distinguish
appropriately between the existence of things on the one hand and the
obtaining of facts on the other, and supplementarily also between
specifically substantival facts regarding existing things, and nonsubstantival
facts regarding states of affairs that are not dependent on the operation of
preexisting things.
He thinks our prejudice here is a presupposition that things can only
originate from things,that nothing can come from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit)
in the sense that no thing can emerge from a thingless condition."
Leibniz:[T]he sufficient reason [of contingent existence] .. . must be outside
this series of contingent things, and must reside in a substance which is the
cause of this series.”
Rescher calls this the principle of genetic homogeneity.
Made disreputable by modern science. Matter can come from energy, and
living organisms from complexes of inorganic molecules. If the principle
fails with matter and life, need it hold for substance as such?
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