Bibliographic record
Abstract
Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason (PSR) is the claim that everything has an explanation. It rules out brute facts, inexplicable primitives, and purely random events. On the usual view, Leibniz grounds the PSR in purely descriptive truths. On my view, Leibniz grounds the PSR in this being the best of all possible worlds. God only creates the best, and a world in which the PSR is true is better than a world in which it is false. For the PSR ensures that the world has an explanatory structure, the investigation of which facilitates human happiness. This way of grounding the PSR faces at least two problems. The first problem is that it presupposes that the PSR is a contingent principle, even though most commentators take it to be necessary. But I argue that Leibniz is indeed committed to the contingency of the PSR. I demonstrate this by showing how, for Leibniz, PSR-violating entities such as vacua, atoms, and indiscernible bodies are possible but not actual. I also argue that the contingency of the PSR does not conflict with Leibniz’s other modal commitments. In particular, it does not conflict with the modal status of his principle of the identity of indiscernibles, nor with the modal status of his theory of truth. The second problem is that this way of grounding the PSR seems to be circular. For the PSR cannot be partially grounded in God’s choice of the best if God’s choice of the best is itself grounded in the PSR. I argue that Leibniz avoids this problem by grounding God’s choice of the best not in the PSR, but in God’s aim to maintain his own happiness. A suboptimal world would compromise God’s happiness, so he only creates the best. This constitutes a novel interpretation of Leibniz’s view that God has created the best of all possible worlds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".