Examples Of How Philosophy Can Be A Principle Of Sufficient Reason Or None Contradiction

Examples of how philosophy can be a principle of sufficient reason or none contradiction

 

Answer: Suppose you enter a farmers' market, pick out a few cucumbers and ask the merchant for the price. "Five dollars a pound". A bit expensive, you may think, but you pay. Before you leave the stand two other people approach the seller with the very same question ("How much are the cucumbers?"). "A dollar a pound", she says to the one; "Ten dollars a pound", she tells the other. At least two of you are likely to attack the merchant with a simple question: Why the price discrepancy? Of course, you may simply leave the place if you have a simple explanation for the discrepancy (for example, that both you and the person who was asked to pay ten dollars a pound belong to commonly discriminated minorities). You may also conclude that the seller is just out of her mind (or that she is just conducting a psychological experiment). In all of these cases you will be entertaining an explanation or reason for a fact that appears odd. But what kinds of facts demand an explanation? Do all facts—including the most ordinary ones—demand an explanation? If you accept an unrestricted form the Principle of Sufficient Reason (= PSR), you will require an explanation for any fact, or in other words, you will reject the possibility of any brute, or unexplainable, facts.

A simple formulation of the principle is as follows:

(1) For every fact F, there must be a sufficient reason why F is the case.

The term "fact" in the above formulation is not intended to express any commitment to an ontology of facts. Still, if one wishes to avoid such connotations, the principle can be formulated more schematically:

(2) For every x, there is a y such that y is the sufficient reason for x (formally: ∀x∃yRyx where "Rxy" denotes the binary relation of providing a sufficient reason).

The PSR is, in fact, a family of principles which are generated by various restrictions of (2), and by ascriptions of different degrees of modal strength to (2). To begin with, variants of the PSR may differ according to how they restrict the kinds of things that require a reason (the explananda). Thus, one might restrict the PSR to only actual entities, or include possibilia as well. Alternatively, one might formulate the PSR as requiring a sufficient reason for every (true) proposition or as pertaining to entities and their properties. A variant of the PSR restricted to entities might require an explanation for the existence and non-existence of entities, or it might be further restricted by requiring a reason only for the existence (or only for the non-existence) of entities. A version of the PSR that is restricted to propositions might range over both contingent and necessary propositions, or it might be further restricted to only one of these sub-domains.

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