Abstract
Several authors believe that there are certain facts that are striking and cry out for explanation—for instance, a coin that is tossed many times and lands in the alternating sequence HTHTHTHTHTHT… (H = heads, T = tails). According to this view, we have prima facie reason to believe that such facts are not the result of chance. I call this view the striking principle. Based on this principle, some have argued for far-reaching conclusions, such as that our universe was created by intelligent design, that there are many universes other than the one we inhabit, and that there are no mathematical or normative facts. Appealing as the view may initially seem, I argue that we lack sufficient reason to accept it.
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Notes
The italics in the quotations were added by me for emphasis.
Both Parfit and White are more or less repeating in brief Leslie’s (1989) fine-tuning argument. Leslie is undecided between two possibilities, God or Multiverse, as explanations for the fine-tuning of our universe. Parfit rules out theism on the basis of the problem of evil, while White rules out multiple universes, arguing that it doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation for the fact that calls for explanation.
Mostly because they claim that there are facts that are striking, but also because I take the principle itself to be striking and mysterious.
More precisely, since strikingness, if it is a genuine property, is plausibly a graded property, the view is that facts can be striking or non-striking to various degrees. For simplicity, I will often just talk as if the view is that facts are either striking or non-striking simpliciter.
Or, if chance counts as an explanation, then “no explanation” should be replaced with “no explanation of a particular type, a non-chancy explanation”. This is how White seems to think, and he suggests that the particular type of explanation required is a stable explanation. See White (2005).
My argument is close in spirit to a recent complaint voiced by Hawthorne and Isaacs against the idea that certain phenomena cry out for explanation. Hawthorne and Isaacs suggest that “that whole notion of ‘crying out for explanation’ is a potentially confusing way of getting at some coarse grained facts about probabilities” (Isaacs and Hawthorne 2018, 143). However, Hawthorne and Isaacs are only making a brief comment in passing. In this paper, I develop this idea into an elaborate argument against the view.
It is also close in spirit to Fumerton’s (1980, 2018) argument against the fundamentality of IBE. Fumerton argues that any justified IBE can be explained by some combination of enumerative inductions and deductions.
See Baras (2018; unpublished ms.).
The example is taken from Baras (unpublished ms.).
For discussion of the idea of a normative explanation, see Schroeder (2005).
This section draws some inspiration from Horwich (1982, 100–104). Note though that Horwich’s argument is very different than mine, and he is arguing against a principle that is different from the striking principle, though perhaps close in spirit, “that verification of relatively surprising consequences of a theory has especially great evidential value” (p. 100).
One formal way to represent the degree to which E confirms H is as the ratio between the posterior of H and the prior. Because \(\frac{P(H|E)}{P\left( H \right)} = \frac{P(E|H)}{P\left( E \right)}\) (a version of Bayes’s law) and (focusing on the right side) E is much more likely conditional on H than the prior of E (when C is initially most probable), this ratio (on the left) is high as well.
Another way to frame the question is to ask whether the striking principle, if true, is a fundamental epistemic principle or is derived from other, more fundamental principles. A similar question is debated regarding inference to the best explanation (IBE) and enumerative induction. The debate was started by Harman (1965), who argues that induction is reducible to IBE. Fumerton (1980) defends the opposite view, that IBE is reducible to induction. For more recent contributions to this debate, see McCain and Poston (2018).
That is, an objection inspired by Hume’s objection to a different version of the argument from design, as described in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion chap. 2.
See above, footnote 9.
I thank an anonymous referee for posing this challenge to me.
Field, for example, explicitly agrees that there are certain facts that Platonists can plausibly accept as brute. He claims however that there is something special about the reliability of mathematicians that seems “altogether too much to swallow” (Field 1989, 26). In the fine-tuning arguments, where we’re discussing the fundamental conditions of the universe, every theory will have to posit some brute facts. Therefore, to make any fine-tuning argument, a distinction between facts that we can leave unexplained and facts that we cannot leave unexplained is needed.
Counting the number of facts that a theory leaves unexplained won’t provide an answer. For instance, many coins were flipped since the first coin was invented, forming many random sequences of tosses. Each of these sequences is a fact. Yet it doesn’t seem to count significantly against a theory if it doesn’t explain this very large number of facts. Arguably, there are infinite such uninteresting facts that are unexplained (in the relevant sense) by all of our best theories.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Sharon Berry, David Enoch, Yehuda Gellman, Eli Pitcovski, Joshua Schechter, Ruth Weintraub and Preston Werner for helpful comments on previous drafts, and to Roger White, Miriam Schoenfield as well as participants in my presentations at Tel Hai College and at the Haifa Conference on the Philosophy of Religion (2018) for helpful discussion.
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Baras, D. A strike against a striking principle. Philos Stud 177, 1501–1514 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01265-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01265-5