50 Comments

Excellent conclusion, and supremely satisfying to have a clearly articulated answer.

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Bravo! This is incredible. I am throughly impressed with how well reasoned and how well written this essay is.

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Serious question -- did Karl Popper or whoever formulated this trilemma read Aristotle? I ask because it appears that many 20th century philosophers (e.g. Russell, Wittgenstein) were not familiar with him and thus spent a lot of time working on problems that the Greek had solved over two millennia ago. Studying the Organon could save us all a lot of headaches.

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It's much more elegant than the Conan solution:

'I refute you thus!'

Snicker-snack! Hack and chop!

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The argument that senses are unreliable because we can be decieved via sensory illusions misses the point that in those instances the senses are in fact reliably giving us information, but our intellect is misinterpretting the information.

In the case of the straw in water, or the shifting gray color, our senses are giving accurate information about the nature and bahavior of light, water, pigment, etc.

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You lost me when you mentioned BELIEFS is a discussion about EPISTEMOLOGY.

BELIEFS are DOXA, not EPISTEME.

DOXA is for Redditors and trans-activists - because there is no veridicality axiom.

[The ALLCAPS is not intended to indicate that I'm SHOUTING... it's meant to indicate that Substack's comment 'system' (sic) is retarded "HelloWorld"-level garbage coded by $7/hr gamma-monkeys.

$7/hr may not be literally true, but is framed as a relativity: Boeing paid $9/hr for the cretins who did the software for 737Max - and we know how that ended.]

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Your fifth axiom reminds me of Lenin's characterization of material reality. In "Materialism and Empirio-criticism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism_and_Empirio-criticism) he wrote: "Matter is an objective reality given to us in sensation."

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Well reasoned and interesting - epistemology certainly is a puzzle. Sorry to pic a nit. "The Law of Non-Contradiction: Nothing can be and not be" needs rephrasing. Reading it straight, my brain thinks you are saying that nothingness simultaneously exits and does not exist. I am sure you don't mean that.

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I probably should have put this as an Addendum to my reply below, but oh well; putting it up here may work as well:

>> The Axiom of Evidence: The evidence of the senses is not entirely unreliable evidence. <<

This can be rephrased as follows using Modal Terms:

AE : {Possibly} Sense perception -> Reliable Evidence.

So "Possibly, If Sense perception then Reliable Evidence" prevails.

The negation of this would be as follows:

~AE : [Necessarily] Sense perception & un-Reliable Evidence.

So, "Necessarily, Sense perception & un-Reliable Evidence" prevails.

Thinkers like Plantinga (probably the top Christian Philosopher of this era; so not a "pushover") would say that ~AE best coincides with Reality, and not AE. In his Naturalistic Argument against Evolution, he implies ~AE by using several examples; all of which come back to the same point:

Naturalistic drives and forces (selective, 'random', etc) do not NEED to sculpt organisms with faculties (or "senses" if you will) that are Truth-tracking (i.e. "Veridical). What said drives and forces NEED to do is merely sculpt organisms that survive and reproduce at certain rates.

A human for example does not NEED eyesight that covers the entire light spectrum; he just needs that narrow bandwidth which enables him to avoid aberrant stuff such as Infra-red and UV spectra lights; and so his faculties are not Veridical; they are "good enough" so that he can eat and mate.

His eyesight therefore is *un-Reliable; if by Reliable we mean that which grounding wise pursues Truth (Classic Externalist Epistemology definition) and is known by custom to do so.

"Refutation" wise... he alone can never refute his own eyesight (others can do it in his stead), and he can only ever find Repugnant whenever others do decide to refute him... but this does not mean that GLOBALLY his Senses are "Irrefutable"... it just means that LOCALLY they appear to him that way. For there are those who do Refute him... and they pay quite the Heavy price to do so.

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Schrodinger's Cat may or may not disagree with some of your axioms.

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Foundherentism was “the hot topic” in Epistemology sometime back (the 90s and early 00s especially).

However; the Demonlord of Skepticism reappeared and smashed it to pieces in the early to mid 10s and onward.

The issue comes down to structural patterns. Namely, once we inductively generalise the Foundherentist crossword analogy; we get to an Infinitist rendering of knowledge and human action.

Relevant: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/infinity/#InfiManyPossActiEverBettWine

(Pay attention in particular to the segment regarding the “”Ever finer Wine” and “St Petersburg paradox”)

We can formulate the following “paradox” of human knowledge:

Say you have a certain pattern of inquiry (economics, biology, etc) and suppose in your particular niche it has been proven to be “good enough” to generate pragmatic and useful results for people.

Therefore, the following Decision tree is available to you:

1) Pursue the status quo (with regard to Noetic grasping, a particular set of coherent evidences, etc). This generates crossword entries at a certain pace, say it is pace “p”.

2) Pursue novelty. This may be an alternate set of coherent evidences (this is simply the case given the principle of Underdetermination with regard to apprehending empirical and scientific evidences) or an alternate set of noetic apprehensions; or some combo of both.

This generates close to “nothing” in the beginning, but after sometime an exponential leap of entries is possible in the crossword given the new horizons tapped into.

If Human Action is to be one that maximises (quality and quantity wise) the vista of knowledge; then the pursuit of epistemical novelty (a la the novel noetic apprehensions and/or alternate evidentiary justification sequences) is the predominant consideration.

In which case the crossword Becomes combinatorially explosive. This inductively dooms us to Infinitism.

So we now have a Novel Infinitism, one that has “size” or cardinality of Aleph-One (the cardinality of the real numbers) rather than Aleph-Nought (the cardinality of the natural numbers). Lovely!

Tl;dr- We still become Demon-food for the Demonlord of Skepticism.

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