Do brute facts exist, and if so, how can we tell if a given fact is brute or requires further explanation?

Question

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 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).

Source: Brute fact - Wikipedia

Do brute facts exist, and if so, are there any well-established examples?

Is the universe a brute fact? Or is the universe explained by something more fundamental?

More generally, given a fact, how can we know if the given fact is brute or can be explained in terms of deeper and more fundamental facts?

Answer 1

I can give an example of where we need brute facts.

Brute facts can be contingent or necessary. This comes up a lot in Philosophy of Religion, especially for Cosmological Arguments for Theism. The debate centers exactly on what is a brute fact for "the universe exists".

The atheist (naturalist) will argue that the initial state (at T=0) is a brute fact, but a necessary one (see Graham Oppy).

In contrast, the theist will argue that it that initial state is contingent on God's choice to make the parameters that way.

If you want to hear a lot more about this, I highly recommend this discussion between Andrew Loke and Graham Oppy

Their debate is exactly around the point where you claim something is a brute fact or a fact that demands an explanation. Dr. Loke is not convinced that Dr. Oppy's assertion that the world at T=0 is necessary; Dr. Loke thinks that it requires something to constrain the state of the world to be the way it was (i.e., is explainable).

Also, Dr. Oppy would take issue with the Wikipedia article: he states in the above discussion that everything has an explanation, but some explanations are simply "Thing A is necessary" which is actually a very strong explanation (albeit an unsatisfying).

Answer 2

Do brute facts exist, and if so, are there any well-established examples?

on "From Philosophy to Program Size: Key Ideas and Methods - Lecture Notes on Algorithmic Information Theory", Chaitin comments of the halting probability Ω that

2.11 In What Sense is Ω Random?

The bits of Ω are mathematical facts that are true for No Reason, they’re true by Accident! [...]

The best way to think about Ω is that each bit of Ω is 0 or 1 with probability 1/2! [...]

Knowing all the even bits of Ω wouldn’t help us to get any of the odd bits of Ω! Knowing the first million bits of Ω wouldn’t help us to get the million and first bit of Ω! The bits of Ω are just like independent tosses of a fair coin! This is the case even though Ω is a specific real number! And even though each bit of Ω is fully determined mathematically. (Even though we can’t compute it nor prove what its value is!)

so it may be a candidate

Answer 3

I don’t think there are such things as brute facts apart from reality as a whole. Everything we have ever observed has a cause, so there is no reason to assume there is none to quite literally anything that happens in the world.

The standard argument against this is that this leads to infinite regress if everything occurs for a reason but I fail to see how. As long as one acknowledges that the initial conditions for the universe (in whichever form they might take) exist for no further reason, it is perfectly acceptable to think that everything that happens within the universe has a cause.

Quantum mechanics does not rule this out. There are currently deterministic theories that claim to explain supposed brute facts, and as scientists, we shouldn’t give up until we find answers.

Answer 4

A brute fact is a recent manifestation of epistemological foundationalism and does not amount to much more than the older concept of sense data.

The problem of any foundationalist theory of knowledge is that in order to justify the truth of any proposition, they need as a bare minimum a first, undeniable fact of some sort they can build upon.

Since the ideas brute fact and sense datum are so similar, the same arguments against one hold for the other (some criticisms can be found in the first link).

Since there is no generally correct answer to your question(s), I would like to refer to the (in my opinion) most comprehensive work on foundationalist vs. holistic theories of knowledge in recent times, which is Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" by deVries and Triplett.

My personal conviction is that brute fact is an illusion and there are good arguments for this sentiment out there for over 60 years now.

Addendum: To say that either there are brute facts or everything can be explained is probably a false dichotomy. It would only hold true if everything that cannot be explained necessarily is a brute fact, which seems a very strong assumption.

Answer 5

Hmmm. I do not think I can answer this without appearing to be flippant, so I will not even try. Brute facts do exist. The best example I can think of is the assertion that everything can be explained. That is a projection with no basis in fact or underlying mechanism other than the pitifully short efforts of humanity to explain things so far. There is woefully insufficient data to make such an assertion, and yet we accept the assertion... A brute fact in opposition to the concept of brute facts.