Why Struggle Against the Trilemma?
An Answer to a Query
Reader “Dan Karelian” from Vox Popoli asked me “From what I gather, you are basically attempting to defend the peripatetic axiom in your series, correct?”
Defending the peripatetic axioms (the presuppositions of logic) has become an instrumental objective but it wasn’t the initial telos of this effort.
About eight years ago, I read Stephen Hicks’ book Explaining Postmodernism. The book ends with the following paragraphs, which have preoccupied my mind since then:
Showing that a movement leads to nihilism is an import part of understanding it, as is showing how a failing and nihilistic movement can still be dangerous. Tracing postmodernism’s roots back to Rousseau, Kant, and Marx explains how all of its elements came to be woven together. Yet identifying postmodernism’s roots and connecting them to contemporary bad consequences does not refute postmodernism. What is still needed is a refutation of those historical premises and an identification and defense of the alternatives to them.
And that is the purpose of this series of essays. It’s also, on a larger level, the purpose of this blog. In various ways I seek to:
Identify a contemporary belief that has lead us to a destructive end.
Examine in detail the premises of and arguments for that belief.
Assess whether alternatives to the premises and arguments can be found.
Astute readers will have noted a similar methodology at work in “Monetary Woes” and “Profit Puzzle” articles.
With regard to the Trilemma, I didn’t set out with an answer in mind. I’m exploring and thinking as I write. At present, I believe (as pointed out in Tackling the Trilemma) that a defense of direct realism and axiomatic logic seems the best approach but I’m not wedded to that answer with any prior commitment.
It may turn out that Leo Strauss was right, and the only way to solve the Trilemma is to simply throw any philosopher who mentions it out of a helicopter. Or was that Pinochet and Communism? Hopefully truth and reason can prevail instead.
I think the Trilemma may have an escape hatch, which has to do with the word "certain."
Hume's inductive skepticism infected Popper (and his intellectual heirs) and that ultimately has led us to this point. I would highly recommend David Stove's "Popper and After" as he shows where the rot started. William Briggs' "Uncertainty" is a great follow-up. Neither is an easy read; both are profound. Add in the work of George Polya ("Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning") and that gets you most of the way there.
Hume was correct: we cannot know things with certainty. So what? Does that mean that we can't "know" anything at all?
As it turns out, R.T. Cox (and some others) have shown mathematically that deduction is really a special case of induction. In deduction, the conclusions follow from the premises with certainty. (i.e. 1s and 0s). In induction, however, the conclusions are not certain, but only more or less probable, expressed as 0 < x < 1. A long line of great scientists (physicists mostly and some mathematicians) have charted this out, from Laplace through E.T. Jaynes ("Probability Theory: The logic of science") and culminates in Claude Shannon's seminal work on Information Theory.
It seems to me that post-modernists - which always seem to be academics, as it turns out - are really freaked out by uncertainty and thus have fallen into the trap of believing they can modus tollens their way to the "right" answers w/o regard or reference to Reality.
I believe that is why they seem to be a bizarre hybrid between "coherentists" and "foundationalists."
The lack of comments on this article suggests that Strauss was right. Avoid the topic.
My own purely intuitive POV on the trilemma is that it is useful to understand. It may reveal wrong thinking but won't reveal truth.
As to the "refutation of historical premises" you are seeking, I always saw nihilism as a philosophical endpoint to reveal a failure in the thought process. What the axis of evil mentioned in the Hick's quote accomplished was to make it acceptable. Otherwise their ideas aren't really new or fresh or insightful. They merely accepted failure as a logical endpoint.
Ultimately the trilemma leads me into religious thinking (from a not very religious person) that there is an unknowable truth. Not satisfying to a philosopher I know but that's two cents from someone who doesn't even qualify as amatuer.
Also, I am thankful to Vox Day for many things but introducing me to your Blog has shot to the top of the list. You are a deep and rigorous thinker with a clear and understandable writing style.
I will be visiting often. Thank you.