Abstract
This paper is about metaphysical ‘infinitism’, the view that there are, or could be, infinite chains of ontological dependence. Its main aim is to show that, contrary to widespread opinion, metaphysical infinitism is a coherent position. On the basis of this, it is then additionally argued that metaphysical infinitism need not fare worse than the more canonical ‘foundationalist’ alternatives when it comes to formulating metaphysical explanations. In the course of the discussion, a rather unexplored parallel with the debate concerning infinitism about justification is suggested.
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Notes
Schaffer differentiates this priority monism from the existence monism, or blobjectivism, recently endorsed, for instance, by Horgan and Potrĉ (2000), according to which only the One really exists—the parts being only a useful fiction.
Strictly speaking, while finiteness entails well-foundedness and, consequently, the negation of well-foundedness entails infinity, infinite chains might still have a ground (the latter would just be infinitely many steps steps away from the starting point). This marks a difference with respect to the set-theoretic meaning of ‘well-founded’, which basically corresponds to the metaphysical ‘finitely grounded’. For simplicity, however, in what follows I will take the metaphysical infinitist thesis to essentially involve the denial of well-foundedness in the sense that there is a fundamental ground of being somewhere.
Although her focus is primarily on metaphysics, Bliss discusses infinite regresses in general, not just RBO-like regresses against metaphysical infinitism. Here, however, we will adapt her arguments to our main discussion.
An important thing to notice here is Bliss’ talk of explanation, i.e., the essential reference to an epistemological element. It seems to me that there is an important distinction to be drawn between this sort of considerations and the purely metaphysical aspects of the issues being discussed; and that such distinction is sometimes, if not often, insufficiently taken into account. More on this later.
Again, I follow Bliss in talking of explanation here, but bear in mind that what is relevant for our discussion is the mind-independent structure of reality, not the structure of the explanations we (may) provide for it.
This, it goes without saying, doesn’t mean that I am committed to the emergence-based infinitist model of justification as the most compelling model of justification, or as the model that epistemologists should agree on or converge towards. For my present purposes, it is enough that certain general features of the model can be usefully transferred to the metaphysical domain.
Grünbaum distinguishes between a staccato-run analysis of motion and a legato-run analysis of motion. Only in the former is motion analysed in terms of successive steps and progressively smaller distances and times. The latter simply coincides with the process of going from the initial to the final point in space taken as a unique whole.
The epistemology/metaphysics dividing line might become blurred in limiting cases. To resort just for a moment to the infamous ‘God’s eye point of view’ metaphor, if God were to create an infinitist universe, surely s/he could/would ‘just’ do it in a single act, without having to go through the infinite process of constituting all composite entities one by one – which, it seems, would take an infinite amount of time even for an omnipotent being! But perhaps God can also embrace all the infinite layers of reality in one single, clear and distinct ‘representation’?
This does not entail that the whole has no properties additional to those of the parts – this would make the claim rather contentious. It is sufficient that the ‘building material’, so to put it, is not less than the material built out of it.
After all, wherever one decides to ‘cut the chain’, as it were, it is still the case that the level of reality one happens to pick is fully determined by an infinity of lower layers.
It might be useful here to point out that the emphasis being put on 'reality as a whole' by no means pushes metaphysical infinitism towards anything like Schaffer's priority monism. To the contrary, as mentioned in the beginning, while Schaffer takes the possibility of gunk (together with other considerations that needn’t entertain us here) to justify a view in which the direction of dependence relations is 'inverted' and the whole is metaphysically fundamental while the parts are dependent, here differentiating the global perspective from all local perspectives is instrumental to a conservative stance towards ontological dependence relations, which continue to flow 'from the larger to the smaller', as it were.
Here's, for instance, what Mill has to say about the relationship between the non-living parts of a living whole, i.e., about life as an emergent phenomenon: “All organised bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents. To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a living body to be extended and perfected, it is certain that no mere summing up of the separate actions of those elements will ever amount to the action of the living body itself.” (A System of Logic, III, 6, 1, italics added).
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that infinitism turns into coherentism: I am not talking about mutual dependence relations going both in the top-down and the bottom-up direction, but rather about an infinite series with a precise direction but neither a specific starting point nor a definite end point (in the terms used in the introduction, that is, a series that is gunky and junky at the same time).
What counts as a good, or better, explanation is not easily and univocally determined in all cases. In particular, it cannot be taken to simply coincide with quantitative economy. And even how exactly Ockham’s razor cuts is not so easily determined, after all.
Schaffer (2010), for example, argues in favour of priority monism on the basis, among other things, of the pervasiveness of quantum entanglement, the form of ‘supersubstantivalism’ that might be read in some approaches to general relativity and the causal interconnectedness of everything in the context of a Big Bang cosmological history of the universe. I believe that Schaffer’s arguments can be disputed (see, for a discussion of some of them, see Morganti 2009), both in general and in their connection to science, but this is immaterial here. More to the point, I agree with Schaffer’s historical and philosophical 'de-construction' of pluralist foundationalism.
See, for instance, Schaffer (2010; 61).
And, even worse, what if only non-boring metaphysical explanations were available for certain phenomena? For a discussion and defence of ‘boring infinite descent’, which, incidentally, also deals with Dehmelt’s model of elementary particles in some detail, see Thako (2014).
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank audiences in Helsinki, Rome and Turin and two anonymous reviewers for very useful feedback on earlier drafts of the paper. Research relevant to this work has been supported by the Italian Ministry of Scientific Research through a grant for the FIRB 2012 project ‘Structures and dynamics of knowledge and cognition’ (Rome unit: F81J12000430001), which I gratefully acknowledge.
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Morganti, M. Dependence, Justification and Explanation: Must Reality be Well-Founded?. Erkenn 80, 555–572 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9655-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9655-4