Abstract
Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all? This question often serves as a debating tactic used by theists to attack naturalism. Many people apparently regard the question—couched in such stark, general terms—as too profound for natural science to answer. It is unanswerable by science, I argue, not because it’s profound or because science is superficial but because the question, as it stands, is ill-posed and hence has no answer in the first place. In any form in which it is well-posed, it has an answer that naturalism can in principle provide. The question therefore gives the foes of naturalism none of the ammunition that many on both sides of the debate think it does.
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Notes
Philosophers, including Leibniz himself, typically interpret the “first question that should rightly be asked” as referring only to those things that could have failed to exist. See van Inwagen (1996, pp. 95–96) and O’Connor (2008) among the many recent treatments that interpret the question this way.
Recent examples include Goldstick (1979), Lowe (1996), van Inwagen (1996), Lowe (1998, ch. 12), Grünbaum (2004), Rundle (2004), all of which give non-theistic answers; O’Connor (2008), which gives a theistic answer; and Parfit (1998), whose answer is harder to classify. I find it curious that Lowe takes seriously the challenge “Why is there anything?” given his many persuasive defenses of a sortalist ontology of the kind I’m using to dismiss the challenge as ill-posed (e.g., Lowe 1989, ch. 2). Taking the challenge seriously forces Lowe to defend two highly contentious claims: (i) infinitely many sets and natural numbers exist but, remarkably enough, not the empty set or the number zero; (ii) every possible world contains at least one concrete object, even if no concrete object exists in every possible world (Lowe 1998, pp. 254–255). For a sortalist like Lowe, (ii) implies that although there needn’t exist pens, or plums, or penguins (and so on, for every sortal), it’s metaphysically necessary that, at all times, there exists some concrete object or other belonging to some genuine kind.
I assume that (a) boundaries can have all the rational values in some interval even if they can have only discrete values in that interval, which in turn assumes that (b) there’s no smallest possible change to a boundary. If we deny (b), then the number of things you’re holding will be finite even if we include fusions. Again, however, “Exactly R or exactly some finite value” is hardly a straight answer to “Exactly how many?” I thank Geoffrey Mason for flagging my assumption of (b).
Although I assume that common-sense objects have fuzzy boundaries if such objects exist at all, the problem I’ve raised for the “fundamental question” doesn’t stem from vagueness. Even if all of the objects you’re holding have perfectly precise boundaries (in which case, again, you can’t hold them for long), the questions “Exactly how many objects are you holding?” and “Why do these objects exist?” are too unspecific to admit of answers. Why do I add the qualification that the well-formed counting questions have right answers “depending on whether our common-sense ontology is true”? Only because, despite my sympathy for theories such as Thomasson’s (2007, 2009) that see “the truth of our common-sense ontology” as a pseudo-issue, I’m not yet convinced that sorites arguments against ordinary objects can be rebutted in either of the two main ways Thomasson considers: supervaluationism and Tye-style indeterminism. It would, however, take me too far afield here to explain exactly why I’m not yet convinced.
More precisely, a true substance sortal.
Marcus (2006) argues persuasively and in detail for the claim that ‘event’ is not a true sortal. For the reasons Marcus gives in regard to ‘event’, I’d include ‘cause’ (as in Demea’s “why this particular succession of causes,” discussed above) among dummy sortals as well. Given the arbitrariness, or interest-relativity, involved in identifying one event but not another as a ‘cause’, the question “Exactly how many causes occurred in the last hour?” looks just as unanswerable as the other pseudo-questions we’ve identified.
I owe the label “covering use” to Thomasson (2007, p. 117, et passim).
To use the material mode, there are no (i.e., it is not the case that there are any) things, objects, items, beings, substances, facts, states of affairs, situations, causes, or events as such. In sum, if one insists on answering the question “Why are there any things?” at face value, the best answer is “There aren’t any”.
I owe this objection to an anonymous reviewer for Erkenntnis.
In a similar vein, Thomasson (2009, pp. 462–466) criticizes the attempt to recast natural-language pseudo-questions in terms that ostensibly avoid dummy sortals by using logical quantifiers and identity instead: “Why are there any things?” for example, becomes “Why is it the case that ∃x(x = x)?” Thomasson gives various reasons for thinking that the attempt fails, among them that all definitions of the quantifiers sooner or later refer to ‘things’, ‘objects’, ‘individuals’, or some such, and hence these reformulations of “general existence questions” smuggle in the dummy sortals that deprived the original questions of determinate sense in the first place.
See Francken and Geirsson (1999).
See Bruno (2010). For obvious reasons, ‘possessions’ and probably also ‘personal possessions’ are dummy sortals; no wonder, then, that disputes arise over exactly how many you’ve got.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, I thank Paul Abela, Andrew Graham, John Schellenberg, audiences at Dalhousie University and Western Michigan University, and two anonymous reviewers for Erkenntnis.
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Maitzen, S. Stop Asking Why There’s Anything. Erkenn 77, 51–63 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9312-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9312-0