In contemporary philosophy, a brute fact is a fact that cannot be explained in terms of a deeper, more "fundamental" fact. There are two main ways to explain something: say what "brought it about", or describe it at a more "fundamental" level. For example, a cat displayed on a computer screen can be explained, more "fundamentally", in terms of certain voltages in bits of metal in the screen, which in turn can be explained, more "fundamentally", in terms of certain subatomic particles moving in a certain manner. If one were to keep explaining the world in this way and reach a point at which no more "deeper" explanations can be given, then one would have found some facts which are brute or inexplicable, in the sense that we cannot give them an
ontological
Ontology is the philosophical study of being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every ...
explanation. As it might be put, there may exist some things that just ''are''.
To reject the existence of brute facts is to think that everything can be explained ("Everything can be explained" is sometimes called
the principle of sufficient reason).
Brute/scientific fact
Henri Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré (, ; ; 29 April 185417 July 1912) was a French mathematician, Theoretical physics, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosophy of science, philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathemati ...
distinguished between brute facts and their scientific descriptions, pointing to how the conventional nature of the latter always remained constrained by the brute fact in question.
Pierre Duhem
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (; 9 June 1861 – 14 September 1916) was a French theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and the theory of Elasticity (physics), elasticity. Duhem was also a prolif ...
argued that just as there may be several scientific descriptions of the same brute fact, so too there may be many brute facts with the same scientific description.
Anscombe
G. E. M. Anscombe
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (; 18 March 1919 – 5 January 2001), usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe or Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophi ...
wrote about how facts can be brute relative to other facts. Simply put, some facts cannot be reducible to other facts, such that if some set of facts holds true, it does not entail the fact brute relative to it. The example she uses is that of someone owing a grocer money for supplying them with potatoes. In such a case, the set of facts, e.g. that the customer asked for the potatoes, that the grocer supplied them with the potatoes, etc., does not necessarily entail that the customer owes the grocer money. After all, this could all have transpired on the set of a film as a bit of acting, in which case the customer would not ''actually'' owe anything. One might argue that if the institutional context is taken into account, putatively brute facts ''can'' be reduced to constituent facts. That is, in the context of something like the institution of a market, a customer ordering potatoes, etc. would entail that they owe the grocer compensation equal to the service that was provided. While Anscombe does acknowledge that an institutional context is necessary for a particular description to make sense, it does not necessarily follow that a particular set of facts holding true in an institutional context entails the fact brute relative to it. To wit, if the example is indeed considered in the institutional context necessary for descriptions of 'owing', it could still be the case that the customer does not owe the grocer, per the counterexample of a film production. This fundamental ambiguity is essentially what makes a fact brute relative to other facts. That being said, Anscombe does argue that under normal circumstance, such a fact ''is'' actually entailed. That is, if it is true that a customer requested potatoes, etc., then ''under normal circumstances'' the customer would indeed owe the grocer money. However, because such entailment is conditional on such a set of facts holding true under a particular set of circumstances, the fact entailed is still fundamentally brute relative to such facts, just that in such a case the leap in inference occurs at the level of the circumstances, not that of the facts themselves. Finally, if a fact brute relative to other facts holds true, it follows that some set of facts it is brute relative to is also true, e.g. if the customer owes the grocer money, then it follows that the grocer supplied them with potatoes. After all, had they not done so, then the customer would not owe them money. As such, given some fact brute relative to other facts, there is a range of facts, such that a set of them will hold if the fact brute relative to them also holds. That being said, Anscombe argues that the full range of facts that some fact can be brute relative to cannot be known exhaustively. The rough range can be sketched out with relevant, paradigmatic examples, but the full range of such facts cannot be known, as one can theoretically always suppose a new special context that changes the range.
Searle
John Searle
John Rogers Searle (; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959 and was Willis S. and Mario ...
developed Anscombe's concept of brute facts into what he called brute physical facts—such as that snow is on Mt. Everest—as opposed to social or institutional facts, dependent for their existence on human agreement. Thus, he considered money to be an institutional fact, which nevertheless rested ultimately on a brute physical fact, whether a piece of paper or only an electronic record.
Searle thought that the pervasiveness of social facts could disguise their
social construction and ultimate reliance upon the brute fact: thus, we are for example trained from infancy (in his words) to see "cellulose fibres with green and gray stains, or enamel-covered iron concavities containing water...
sdollar bills, and full bathtubs".
Vintiadis
In 2018 Elly Vintiadis edited a collection of papers on brute facts that is the first systematic exploration of bruteness and which includes original papers by a number of philosophers and scientists. The collection focuses on physical, emergent and modal brute facts rather than social facts. Vintiadis argues that a properly understood naturalistic attitude requires that we accept the existence of ontological brute facts and also, possibly, emergent brute facts.
Beyond the initial definition given above of brute facts as facts that do not have explanations, there is a distinction drawn by Eric Barnes (1994) between epistemically brute facts and ontologically brute facts. The former are for which we do not have an explanation, they are brute for us (e.g., Vintiadis cites the fact that gases behave in a manner described by the Boyle-Charles law was an epistemologically brute fact until its explanation in terms of the kinetic theory of gases). The latter, ontologically brute facts are facts for which there is no explanation in virtue of the way the world is (e.g., the fundamental laws of physics). Which facts we accept as ontologically brute though depends on what kind of theory of explanation we accept (e.g. the properties of fundamental particles will be brute facts under a mereological view of explanation, but a fundamental law will be brute under a covering law model of explanation).
Infinitism
According to explanatory
infinitism, the chain of explanations goes on infinitely and there is no fundamental explanation. This, then, is another way of objecting to the existence of explanatory brute facts, but also metaphysical brute facts, if bruteness is understood in terms of ontological independence.
On the question of
why there is anything at all, some have suggested the possibility of an
infinite regress, where, if an entity can't come from
nothing
Nothing, no-thing, or no thing is the complete absence of ''anything'', as the opposite of ''something'' and an antithesis of everything. The concept of nothing has been a matter of philosophical debate since at least the 5th century BCE. Ea ...
and this concept is
mutually exclusive
In logic and probability theory, two events (or propositions) are mutually exclusive or disjoint if they cannot both occur at the same time. A clear example is the set of outcomes of a single coin toss, which can result in either heads or tails ...
from ''something'', there must have always been ''something'' that caused the previous effect, with this causal chain (either
deterministic or
probabilistic) extending infinitely back in
time
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
.
Examples
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual. He had influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, and various areas of analytic ...
took a brute fact position when he said, "I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all."
Sean Carroll similarly concluded that "any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation."
See also
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First principle
In philosophy and science, a first principle is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption. First principles in philosophy are from first cause attitudes and taught by Aristotelians, and nuan ...
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Four causes
The four causes or four explanations are, in Aristotelianism, Aristotelian thought, categories of questions that explain "the why's" of something that exists or changes in nature. The four causes are the: #Material, material cause, the #Formal, f ...
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Is and ought problem – the distinction between
fact
A fact is a truth, true data, datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance. Standard reference works are often used to Fact-checking, check facts. Science, Scientific facts are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement by ...
ual claims and
value or
normative claims
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Matter of fact and matter of law
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Münchhausen trilemma
References
Further reading
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External links
* {{cite book , url= http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405106795_chunk_g97814051067953_ss1-111 , title= Brute fact , publisher= Blackwell Reference , work= Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy , date= 2004 , isbn= 9781405106795 , editor-first1= Nicholas , editor-last1= Bunnin , editor-first2= Jiyian , editor-last2= Yu
Concepts in epistemology
Value (ethics)