Comment by superninja109 on 02/02/2025 at 06:38 UTC

7 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)

View submission: The Principle of Sufficient Reason is Self-Evident and its Criticisms are Self-Defeating (a case for the PSR being the fourth law of logic)

Your claim that any criticism of the PSR is self-defeating does not work. You claim that "to give a reason is to accept the PSR."

For one, the skeptic can quite plausibly claim that "One should give reasons when arguing/challenging a claim" is just a dialectical norm, not anything deeply true about the world.

For another, this just does not follow. Your PSR states "*all* contingent facts have reasons for their existence." One does not need to accept this to say that "*some* contingent facts have reasons for their existence." One's acceptance of this weaker claim is enough to license giving reasons.

This is also relevant to the other argument you like to make against PSR skeptics: you present some absurd event and then claim that the skeptic is committed to denying that any explanation can be given for why that absurdity does not happen. The skeptic can respond by simply saying that *some* contingent facts have explanations. The absurd examples that you present don't happen because they contradict some law of nature, and that's the explanation. But this doesn't commit them to claiming that every fact has an explanation. Bearing a default assumption that most things will have explanations is good for inquiry, but this doesn't mean that one must accept the PSR.

Also, about the van Inwagen counterargument that the PSR entails necessitarianism, the problem here seems to be, not that this makes things bad for free will, but rather that the PSR is only vacuously true. It purports to tell us all contingent truths have a certain property. But there are no contingent truths (by necessitarianism), so the PSR is about as meaningful as "all square circles have 4 sides."

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Comment by contractualist at 02/02/2025 at 11:15 UTC*

-5 upvotes, 1 direct replies

If one’s demands for reasons are nothing more than a “dialectical norm,” and the norm itself lacks reasons of its own (as its pure convention) then such a norm would be arbitrary and ungrounded. The skeptics basis of attack would be unjustified since it relies on nothing more than convention.