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The reputation of the principle of sufficient reason is somewhat blemished these days by
its association with fundie types and their cosmological efforts to prove God. But this
is a little unfair on the PSR because, whatever else it's various formulations are taken to
mean, and there's quite a variety, they all liberate us from having to surrender, in any
total strategic sense, to ineliminable mystery. And thereby, in a more down to earth political
context, to that arbitrary and unquestionable authority that totalitarian types often claim
for themselves by means of appeal to mystery. This idea has had some effect on political
affairs in the previous quarter millenium.
The PSR is not without its shortcomings, however. We all have a desire to explain; and the principle
that there is always an explanation can thus easily seduce us into claiming that we are
able to explain, when in fact we cannot. It is this panglossian tendency of some early
varieties of the PSR to exclude any tactical admission of ignorance, that some critics
of the enlightenment pick up on when they bemoan its tendencies to despotism.
It is important then, less we turn into the very tyrants we despise, to recognise that
the PSR does not guarantee a perfect world perfectly understood, nor the eventual possibility
of one. Thus there remains, and seems set always to remain, a requirement for necessary
evils: such as guns. Guns being nasty tools whose job is to inflict, or to threaten to
inflict, biological trauma via the material projection of kinetic energy.
As of 2013, for good use or ill, this is the gun with which a British soldier is likely
to be equipped:
Note the use of technologies such as advanced materials, precision manufacturing, small
calibre ammunition, and adjustable gas operation; which ensure that, within a reasonable range
and sans velocity sapping barriers, this tool does its nasty job very well.
This, meanwhile, for good use or ill, is the kind of PSR with which a naturalistic British
philosopher is likely to be equipped.
In ordinary language, this says that for every truth T, if T, then there is some possible
explanation E, such that E adequately explains T.
Note the use of technologies such as Fregian Quantification, Propositional Calculus, Tarskian
Truth-Semantics and Kripkean Modality; which ensure that, within a reasonable extension
and sans veracity-sapping barriers, this tool performs it's tyrant-frustrating job very
well.
However, the co-contemporaneous English gun, during the heyday of the continental rationalism
of Leibniz and Wolff, was this:
Clearly it does the same Job as the current gun; but equally clearly, due to the lack
of technology, less well.
The same holds for the early-modern variety of the PSR. Which, incidentally, is why its
formulations are just its name, or what it's supposed to demonstrate, in latin!
Why is this a problem?
Because, many fundies who invest in philosophical criticisms of Godless naturalism, are prone
to thinking that the history of modern philosophy looks something like this:
They are thus apt, in not wanting to reveal themselves as the anachronistic clowns they
in fact are, to cobbling late 20th century embellishments to standard early-modern rationalist
arguments. Which results in things that look, to less blinkered thinkers, like this:
Which is silly. And I hope gives the layman some idea as to why the supposedly serious
arguments of the conservative Christian doctors, much lauded by Youtube apologists, are often
met with an amused disdain within the broader philosophical community.
Thank you for listening.