Does Everything Have a Reason?

Do you agree that everything has a reason? That there are no brute, unexplainable facts? Then you believe in the Principle of Sufficient Reason or PSR.

A formal formulation of the PSR is: For every x, there is a y such that y is the sufficient reason for x.
Hence the PSR has two parts. What is this x, this entity that requires explaining? And what does y, the reason or the explanation, look like?

For x, the entity, what are these things requiring a reason or an explanation? Actual things? The properties of these actual things? How about possible things? Or true propositions which can be about physical objects but also concepts or ideas? Or events?

For y, the reason, what do these reasons or explanations look like? And how does the entity requiring explanation affect the type of acceptable or sufficient reason for them? That is, what is the relationship between x and y, the entity and its reason?

Most of all, who cares? Why is the PSR important?

Say you send your kid to the doctor and your kid happens to pass away during the consultation. When you ask the doctor what happened, he says, there is no reason, your kid just simply passed away. Will you accept that? Surely you would expect that minimally, he makes an investigation, conducting an autopsy or running a series of tests to determine the cause of death. If we don’t consider the PSR to be true, we could perhaps be ready to accept that the child’s sudden death was simply a brute fact, having and requiring no explanation. But if we consider the PSR to be true, at least for this specific case, we must then keep searching for an explanation.

My example was about doctors, but imagine if scientists, historians, philosophers or even others such as policemen or civil servants to simply not probe further in their respective fields, what the world would look like.

But do we really have any grounds to accept the PSR to be true? The PSR states that all things must be explainable, so how do we explain the PSR itself? And how about primitive, self-evident or self-explanatory facts or concepts that cannot be further explained? Can the PSR allow for the existence of such facts?

In fact, where does the PSR even come from? The term was coined by Leibniz though Spinoza is considered to precede Leibniz in thinking about the significance of the principle, giving it a prominent position in his philosophy. Prior to them, the pre-socratics and medieval thinkers were using the PSR though they did not call it as such.

In 1663, Spinoza published his first book where its 11th axiom states: Nothing exists of which it cannot be asked, what is the cause, why it exists.

By considering the PSR to be axiomatic, Spinoza came up with interesting conclusions such as a proof of God, how there is only 1 possible world and how we do not have free will.

Interestingly enough, in a later work entitled the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza permits one thing to not have a cause, where the thing is known through itself and in itself. It is believed he is referring to God. Though god does not need a cause in order to exist, there is a reason why god does not need a cause, so the PSR is still sound.

Let’s turn to Leibniz, the first to name the PSR and formulate it with complete generality. He considers the PSR to be part of our reasoning machinery, like the Principle of Non-contradiction. He does admit though that while everything has a reason, “most of the time these reasons cannot be known to us.”

Why he believes the PSR is valid relates to his idea of truth, which he elaborates through his conceptual containment theory of truth. To illustrate, we’d use categorical propositions of the subject-predicate form. A proposition is true if the concept of the predicate is contained in the concept of the subject. For e.g. let us consider the statement ‘all bachelors are unmarried.’ The concept of the predicate, unmarried, is contained in the concept bachelor. This conceptual containment explains the truth of the statement. Leibniz makes the further claim that all true statements exhibit conceptual containment, even statements such as Caesar crossed the Rubicon. He suggests that crossing the Rubicon is contained in the concept of Caesar! This is a sufficient reason why it is true that Caesar indeed crossed the Rubicon, but such a truth cannot be known in advance of its occurrence because it is buried deep within the concept of Caesar. Only God can know it, and God making that connection is a sufficient reason.

Not everyone agrees with the PSR. David Hume’s rejection of the concept of causation is in effect a rejection of PSR. Others like Euler thinks proofs dependent on PSR proves nothing but is begging the question. PSR remains a topic of research in philosophy, where Dasgupta as recently as 2016 appealed to the idea of autonomous facts or facts not apt for explanation to be the terminal points of chains of explanations. Meanwhile, we see the application of PSR in everyday life, including ethics, where if a person expresses a controversial view, such as racism, a genuine concerned interlocuter will be led to probe further into the underlying reasons for that attitude rather than simply accepting it as it is.
So, do you think that everything has a reason? Is there no room for randomness in this universe? Or is randomness itself considered a sufficient reason? If so, then indeed Euler is right, the explanations seem to be begging the question.

Reference:
Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy 

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