Identifying the cause of an event is supposed to supply a reason or explanation why that event happened. Job done.īack to the cosmological argument. In mathematician David Hilbert’s story of the Grand Hotel (cited by George Gamov in his book One Two Three Infinity, 1947 - the inspiration for ) there is still room for an infinite number of new guests even though each one of the infinitely many rooms is occupied - the old guests are simply asked to move to the room which was double the number of the room they were in before, leaving an infinite number of empty rooms. 0, 1, 2, 3… can paired off with 0, 2, 4, 6… That’s just one of the weird properties of the infinite. What that means in layman’s terms is that if you remove half of an infinite series, you still have the same ‘number’ of items. “An infinite set is a set whose members can be put into a 1-1 correlation with a proper subset of itself.” Nothing bad or vicious about that at all.
Infinte regress series#
Or you can have a series that is infinite in both directions, e.g. the series 0, 1, 2, 3… which terminates at 0, or the series 0, -1, -2, -3… which also terminates at 0. In mathematics, there are examples of an infinite series that is terminated at one end and and not the other, e.g. If the series doesn’t terminate but just keeps going back further and further in time, that would be an infinite regress.įirst, I need to explain the difference between an infinite regress - for example, a regress of causes and effects, or of explanations - and an infinite series.
If the series terminates with the Big Bang, then that would be an event without a cause, contrary to the belief that every event has a cause. If we trace chains of cause and effect back far enough we either get to a Big Bang (the beginning of the universe) or the causes and effects go back for ever. I’m guessing that what you mean by your question is what is so bad about a regress that is NOT terminated, and hence infinite.Īn infinite regress which is considered bad is sometimes called a ‘vicious regress’.Īn example of an argument that uses the idea of an infinite regress is the Cosmological argument for the existence of God. Two very general questions guided this work: How are infinite regresses generated in infinite regress arguments? How do infinite regresses logically function as premises in an argument? In answering these questions I clarify the notion of an infinite regress identify different logical forms of infinite regresses describe different kinds of infinite regress arguments distinguish the rhetoric from the logic in infinite regress arguments and suggest ways of improving our discussion and our practice of constructing and evaluating these arguments.Why does an infinite regress have to be terminated? My general approach to contribute to such a theory, consists of collecting and evaluating as many infinite regress arguments as possible, comparing and contrasting many of the formal and non-formal properties, looking for recurring patterns, and identifying the properties that appeared essential to those patterns. These consequences of our customary way of using this tool indicate that there is a need for a theory to re-orient our practice. But how sharp or strong is this tool? How effectively is it used? The typical presentation of infinite regress arguments throughout history is so succinct and has so many gaps that it is often unclear how an infinite regress is derived, and why an infinite regress is logically problematic, and as a result, it is often difficult to evaluate infinite regress arguments. Infinite regress arguments are part of a philosopher's tool kit of argumentation.
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