Wiktionary
alt. An inscrutable datum of experience; a thing that be the case, but which is impervious to reasoned explication. n. An inscrutable datum of experience; a thing that be the case, but which is impervious to reasoned explication.
Wikipedia
In contemporary philosophy, a brute fact is a fact that has no explanation. More narrowly, brute facts may instead be defined as those facts which cannot be explained (as opposed to simply having no explanation). To reject the existence of brute facts is to think that everything can be explained. ("Everything can be explained" is sometimes called the principle of sufficient reason). There are two ways to explain something: say what "brought it about", or describe it at a more "fundamental" level. For example, a cat displayed on a computer screen can be explained, more "fundamentally", as there being certain voltages in bits of metal in my screen, which in turn can be explained, more "fundamentally", as that there are certain subatomic particles moving in a certain way. If we keep explaining the world in this way and reach a point at which no more "deeper" explanations can be given, then we would have found some facts which are brute or inexplicable, in the sense that we . As it might be put, there may exist some things that just are. The same thing can be done with causal explanations. If nothing made the big bang expand at the velocity it did, then this is a brute fact in the sense that it lacks a causal explanation.
Usage examples of "brute fact".
He had become not so much a living creature as a brute fact of nature, opaque and impenetrable, all of his experiences sealed off within him.
Confrontation with brute fact didnt stop him from musing, but did keep him from taking himself too seriously.
Confrontation with brute fact didn't stop him from musing, but did keep him from taking himself too seriously.
Since you have learned the term from your son, then, I shall not deny the brute fact of the matter.
And the brute fact was so much taken for granted, few people above the age of nine ever bothered asking why.
Yet I find an absolute responsibility for the fact that my facticity (here the fact of my birth) is directly inapprehensible and even inconceivable, for this fact of my birth never appears as a brute fact but always across a projective reconstruction of my for-itself.
That's the way geology used to be, kid, a thing of dreams and fancies unsullied by brute fact.
Perhaps a finite and contingent creature- a creature that might not have existed-will always find it hard to acquiesce in the brute fact that it is, here and now, attached to an actual order of things.