#sufficient reason

[bygone]

Nothing without a sufficient reason!

Nothing without a sufficient reason!

Science by all means wishes to make only assertions whose legitimacy is well-established. Nothing without a sufficient reason! That is the principle of science.

Edmund Husserl, INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE, 122-123

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[the-hexagonal-conundrum]

Suppose you enter a farmers’ market, pick out a few cucumbers and ask the merchant for the price. “Five dollars a pound”. A bit expensive, you may think, but you pay. Before you leave the stand two other people approach the seller with the very same question (“How much are the cucumbers?”). “A dollar a pound”, she says to the one; “Ten dollars a pound”, she tells the other. At least two of you are likely to attack the merchant with a simple question: Why the price discrepancy? Of course, you may simply leave the place if you have a simple explanation for the discrepancy (for example, that both you and the person who was asked to pay ten dollars a pound belong to commonly discriminated minorities). You may also conclude that the seller is just out of her mind (or that she is just conducting a psychological experiment). In all of these cases you will be entertaining an explanation or reason for a fact that appears odd. But what kinds of facts demand an explanation? Do all facts—including the most ordinary ones—demand an explanation? If you accept an unrestricted form the Principle of Sufficient Reason (= PSR), you will require an explanation for any fact, or in other words, you will reject the possibility of any brute, or unexplainable, facts.

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/