The Hume-Edwards-Campbell (HEC) principle says that if you have a bunch of items, and each one is explained, then the whole bunch might be explained. In particular, any infinite regress might be a complete explanation. The Hume-Edwards principle replaces the "might" with "is". I've published counterexamples to the HEC before, but here is a cool recipe for generating counterexamples.
Let p1,p2,... be an explanatory regress of propositions, so p2 explains p1, p3 explains p2, and so on. Suppose (as might easily be the case) that there is some proposition q such that (a) q couldn't be self-explanatory, and (b) the pi are all clearly completely explanatorily irrelevant to q. Now, let qi=pi&q. Then q1,q2,... are an infinite explanatory regress. But if q couldn't be self-explanatory, this regress can't be completely explanatory as it does nothing to advance the explanation of q.
I might have got the basic idea here from Dan Johnson. I can't remember. The counterexamples depend on the idea that if A explains B and Q is irrelevant, then A&Q explains B&Q. I am a bit less sure of that than when I started writing this post (which was quite a while ago).
6 comments:
Dr Pruss
I've tried to come up with a counter-example to HEC that my students can grasp (they're 14- 16) but I feel like I'm missing the point. I'll try posting it here, and hopefully someone can tell me what I'm ding wrong. (popularisation ain't as easy as it looks)
To take another example from the life of a teacher, suppose we have a layabout student who is perpetually underachieving. Call him Jim. Now one day Jim presents a piece of examination work that is flawless. Not a single mistake has been made. Perhaps our teaching has brought Jim’s intellect to life.
But anyone who knows us will tell you that it is much more likely that Jim cheated. So when we check we find that he has copied his work from another student, John. So we’ve explained Jim’s answers…but then discover a bigger problem.
When we mark all the papers it transpires that every student who sat the test achieved a perfect score! Now this is practically impossible unless cheating took place. We’ll need to explain to the external examiner how this occurred.
When we investigate it transpires that John has copied of a brighter student, Jill. And it doesn’t stop there. Jill copied off Susan, Susan off Gillian, Gillian off Mike and so on. We can find out how and why each act of copying took place. In principle we could have an infinitely long list of students all copying off each other (if we taught in large enough classrooms). But even if we can explain how each act of copying took place we still have not explained why every student has achieved the perfect score.
We won’t have an explanation for Jim’s perfect score if we discover and list every act of cheating. We won’t have our explanation until we answer a fundamental question. Who sat down and worked out the perfect answer in the first place? Until we know how that perfect answer was created and made its way to our students we have not explained why every student has a perfect score. But once we have that explanation we have reached a stopping point. Nothing more need be said.
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Hello,
Thank you for your work. I am a high schooler living in Texas and have been fascinated by your work. Please excuse me if I make any philosophical mistakes as I am not trained in this field
I had a question about your paper written in 1998 "The Hume-Edwards Principle and the Cosmological Argument." In it you argue against the claim that an infinite regress of contingent facts that explain each other is a sufficient explanation for the entirety of the universe.
You use the example of a cannon ball launched at 11:58 and from the point from 11:59 to 12:00 every time (T) has a time (T') before it that explains its trajectory in the future. This is similar to an infinite regress of contingent beings explaining each other. However, it would be absurd for one to say that the cannon ball explains itself - one must appeal to the cannon.
I find this to be a very powerful argument, but I have one concern. Couldn't the opposition counter by saying that time is made of discrete parts and thus there would be a time T that does not have a time (T') before it within the range of 11:59 to 12:00.
Thank you for your help,
Danish
Yeah, since I've written the paper I've come to be much more attracted to the discrete time view. However, I think the following point remains: we can _imagine_ time to be continuous, and even under that hypothesis, the flight of the cannon-ball is not explained without a first moment. This hypothetical is enough to make one think the Hume-Edwards principle is false.
That makes sense. Thank you for your response.
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