The Rarity of Noesis

How the Diversity of Human Faculties Solves the Münchhausen Trilemma

I recently discovered that a friend of mine is color-blind. The conversation went like this:

Friend: “I’m color-blind.”

Me: “Wait, really? How do you know?”

Friend: “Because… I can’t see color. Therefore I’m color-blind.”

Fair enough. I was persuaded. My friend is color-blind. Now imagine that the conversation had gone like this instead:

Friend: “You’re color-blind.”

Me: “What? No I’m not. What makes you think that?”

Friend: “Because I can’t see color. Therefore you’re color-blind.”

Would this persuade you that you were color-blind? Even if you can see the elephant in the room?

Hold that thought.

A Brief Re-Introduction to the Münchhausen Trilemma

If you’re a long-time reader of Tree of Woe, you’ll know that I have a long-standing obsession with the millennia-old philosophical problem called the Münchhausen Trilemma. I’ve written about it on three prior occasions:

• The Horror of Münchhausen's Trilemma (Oct 21, 2020)

• Why Struggle Against the Trilemma (Oct 31, 2020)

• Defending Against the Trilemma (Jul 20, 2022)

The Münchhausen Trilemma presents a challenge to the justification of knowledge. It proposes that any attempt to justify knowledge will ultimately lead to one of three unsatisfactory options:

• Circular Reasoning: The truth asserted involves a circularity of proofs.

• Infinite Regress: The truth asserted rests on truths themselves in need of proof, and so on to infinity. 

• Arbitrary Assumption: The truth is based on an unsupported assumption.

Postmodern thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and Donald Davidson have wielded the Trilemma like a cudgel, arguing that since every belief is based on unsupported assertions, the only criteria for “truth” can be reference to other assertions, a position academically known as coherentism and popularly seen in phrases such as “truth is subjective,” “truth is a social construct,” and so on. Its the basis for how our elites view the world, as an imposition of a Narrative.

The philosopher Stephen Hicks has demonstrated in his bestselling book Explaining Postmodernism that this attack vector (and a related series of offensives) led to the overturning of classical and enlightenment philosophy and ultimately led to postmodernism. The defense of classical or enlightenment thought must be grounded in some sort of foundationalism, in which knowledge is grounded on truths that are not unsupported assertions.

Where can such truths be found? In Defending Against the Trilemma, I noted that:

Since Aristotle, the answer to that question is that belief can be founded upon axioms. What is an axiom? Although Aristotle himself had a stricter standard, conventionally an axiom has been defined as a self-evident proposition.

That definition, however, begs the question: Self-evident to whom?… The skeptical assault on self-evident axioms proved devastating.

Hold that thought.

The Diversity of Human Faculties

Back in March 2022, in a post entitled The Hierarchy of Intelligences & IQ, William M Briggs wrote:

What should be clear… is that a person who cannot fathom recursion doesn't understand recursion. Not understanding it, he cannot form an idea of it, how it feels, what it's like to be have this power, as it were. Those of you who can grasp recursion, feel this power, and know its nature.

It is certain your dog, which is an intelligent creature, as long as we're being loose with "intelligent", cannot do recursion. It doesn't have the intellect man does. It cannot know what it is like to be a man and have this power. Nor can it know the power of speech, a form of intellection, and all that flows from it.

That there is a hierarchy of intelligences, well observed, implies---via induction, our strongest form of reasoning---that there are ways of thinking, modes of intellection, beyond which we can understand… We can't know what these higher forms of thinking are, or are like, in the same way a man who cannot understand recursion cannot know what recursion is like.

What Dr. Briggs has said of intelligence is true of the entire range of human faculties. Someone who is born without a mind's eye cannot know what it is like to have one -- in fact, they often go their whole lives thinking "mind's eye" is just a metaphor, not an actual faculty. Someone who is born color-blind cannot know what it is like to see color. Someone who is born blind cannot know what it is like to see. Someone who is born without olfaction cannot know what it is like to catch scent of baking vanilla cookies.¹ And someone who is born without noesis cannot know what it is like to directly apprehend a truth.

Now, noesis is my preferred term for a philosophical concept that dates back to Plato. It’s derived from the Ancient Greek term nous. According to Plato, nous is the highest form of human understanding and is responsible for our ability to grasp eternal, unchangeable truths. According to Aristotle, nous was the intellectual faculty that enables us to grasp the first principles or fundamental truths of reality.

The Scholastics inherited the concept, calling it in Latin intellectio intuitio. According to the Scholastics, intellectio intuitio is that type of intellectual perception that goes beyond discursive reasoning or deductive logic. It is a direct, immediate, and non-inferential understanding of a concept or truth.

Noesis fell into disrepute after the Scholastics, but has recently been resuscitated by some heterodox thinkers. For instance, in his book The Emperor’s New Mind, Roger Penrose has implied that the existence of our noetic faculty (though he does not call it that) is what allows the human mind to transcend computation. Book reviewer Michael George explains:

[Penrose’s] approach depends on Gödel’s theorem. As this is a metamathematical result, and its truth recognized outside the bounds of logical and mathematical algorithms, he asserts that this means there are truths we have access to as conscious beings that a computer could not… We have direct access to certain truths.

I agree with Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Penrose that the noetic faculty exists; indeed, I more than agree - I know that it exists because I have experienced it. Where I part ways with those august minds, however, is that I believe that not every human being is endowed with noesis.

The Solution to the Trilemma

When we accept that noesis is a natural human faculty present in some but not all individuals, we realize that axioms deemed self-evident (that is, directly apprehended as true) by those with noesis might not be self-evident to others lacking it.

In addressing the Münchhausen Trilemma, the faculty of noesis allows for the establishment of axiomatic foundations without resorting to circular reasoning or infinite regress. This is because those with noesis can directly perceive and understand the truth of axioms without requiring further justification. The ability to apprehend first principles noetically means that the faculty of noesis enables an individual to bypass the need for external justification, thereby resolving the trilemma.

Skeptics often question the validity of knowledge claims and the possibility of establishing a secure foundation for knowledge. But if noesis is a faculty present in some but not all individuals, we come to understand that skeptics are simply those individuals who lack the capacity for noesis.

Without noesis, skeptics find it difficult or impossible to directly apprehend first principles or fundamental truths, leading them to question the validity of any knowledge claim. From their perspective, axioms deemed self-evident by those with noesis would appear arbitrary and unsupported, and they would be unable to find a satisfactory resolution to the Münchhausen Trilemma.

My concept of noesis as an innate but unevenly-distributed intellectual faculty thus offers me my long-sought resolution to the Münchhausen Trilemma. Through the lens of noesis, skepticism is simply the natural consequence of the absence of this intellectual capacity in some individuals.

Nowadays, when I encounter a skeptic who rejects self-evident axioms, I agree that the axioms are not self-evident to him. But I do not believe him when he says they’re not self-evident to me. Just because some men can’t see color doesn’t mean none of us can see color. And just because some men can’t perceive truth noetically doesn’t mean none of us can perceive truth noetically.

A similar solution exists to the philosophical problem of free will. An associate of mine frequently asserts that he does not believe in free will because he himself does not experience it — he describes himself as being “along for the ride.” I believe my associate when he says does not have free will. I don’t believe him when he says that I don’t. Just because some people are meat robots doesn’t mean we all are.

Contemplate this noetic truth on the Tree of Woe (if you can).

1. And, of course, even the most sensitive human nose cannot compare to the olfactory faculty of dogs, who might not be able to do recursion but whose faculty of scent is beyond our ability to conceive. For more on this concept, see Thomas Nagel’s famous article “What is like to be a bat?”