Explanatory principlism

There are three views about ultimate explanations of reality:

1. Nihilism: There is no ultimate explanation of reality.

2. Onticism: The ultimate explanation of reality involves one or more beings.

3. Principlism: The ultimate explanation of reality involves principles rather than beings.

Nihilism is the standard view among atheists. Onticism is the standard view among theists. The main examples of principlism are axiarchism and optimalism, on which reality is explained by its having the kind of value it does. But other combinations are possible: Rescher was an principlist theist, since he thought that God’s existence could be explained by the fact that it’s for the best that God exists.

I want to say a little about what I think is wrong about principlism. Start with the observation that if truthmaker maximalism is true, principlism cannot get off the ground, because whatever principle helps explain the world is made true by the existence of some being, and if an explanatory proposition is made true by a being, that being is certainly “involved” in the explanation.

Truthmaker maximalism is false. However, I think that a neighboring grounding view is true:

4. Being grounds truth (BGT): All truths are grounded in a combination of what there isn’t, what there is and how what is is.

Given BGT, we have very good reason to reject principlism. For presumably all the principles involved in the explanation of reality are true. If any of them are grounded in what there is or how what is is, then we have onticism rather than principlism: onticism is compatible with principles being involved in explanation, as long as beings are also involved. Thus the only way to defend principlism is to say that what gives the ultimate explanation are principles made true solely by the nonexistence of certain entities. And it is very implausible that the nonexistence of certain entities is the ultimate explanation of our reality, rich in being as it is.

The one version of principlism I can think of that I can reconcile with BGT would be an explanation of our reality in terms of the non-existence of beings that would prevent this reality. (This is kind of like the idea in the Scotus argument that nothing can prevent the existence of God, so God exists.) But this is dubious. Mere lack of preventers of x is not enough to explain the existence of x. One would need some kind of basic principle of plenitude on which everything not prevented must exist.