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."
Hmmm. So I actually DON'T think Hume was correct. I think we CAN know some things with certainty, including the fact that we can. We can't know everything with certainty, but we can know some things. Only if we abandon Aristotelian intellectio / nous is Hume correct, and I haven't abandoned it.
William Briggs has separately told me he thinks my solution to the trilemma is the right one and recommend a book on Aristotelian induction which supports it. I'll be reading that next and will post on it. I'm sure it'll be of interest.
Thanks for taking the time to read my back catalog - I really appreciate it!
I can see you don’t buy the inductive skepticism. Briggs deals with the exact points you’re going through in his book Uncertainty. The first four chapters should be part of any education in philosophy, IMO. Call it the Cliffs Notes version of the western canon from Aristotle to the present.
C.S. Lewis also used nearly the same argument you arrived at to refute Materialism. If it’s all just random molecules colliding then that refutes the refutation. I can’t trust my refutation if that’s just the product of molecules and we’re right back to square one and nihilism.
Richard Smith in “Ideas Have Consequences” has made the claim that once William of Ockham gave up the argument on the existence of “Transcendents” that it was inevitable we would wind up here.
Stove blames Popper.
Wherever the “blame” lies, you’re doing the right thing by going the next step - let’s rebuild something durable on the ashes.
Happy to pay for that quality of writing. (Btw, You can get away with stopping at chapter 4. There’s a lot of math after that and I still need to brush up on my symbolic logic.) ;-)
Did I miss an essay? So what is your proposed solution to the Trilemma?
For me, Rand's epistemology works. The conceptualist's point of view is too naval gazing for me - seems to be an intellectual's form of mental masturbation. But I am not well educated on all of this philosophy, so perhaps my take is that of a philosophical Luddite. ;-)
Put another way, the conceptualist's "we do not know whether or not our mental objects have any foundation outside of our minds in nature.” well, I suppose not but bankrupting sense making on something that is also unprovable lacks utility.
I do very much appreciate your work, I'm learning a lot.
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 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."
Hmmm. So I actually DON'T think Hume was correct. I think we CAN know some things with certainty, including the fact that we can. We can't know everything with certainty, but we can know some things. Only if we abandon Aristotelian intellectio / nous is Hume correct, and I haven't abandoned it.
William Briggs has separately told me he thinks my solution to the trilemma is the right one and recommend a book on Aristotelian induction which supports it. I'll be reading that next and will post on it. I'm sure it'll be of interest.
Thanks for taking the time to read my back catalog - I really appreciate it!
I can see you don’t buy the inductive skepticism. Briggs deals with the exact points you’re going through in his book Uncertainty. The first four chapters should be part of any education in philosophy, IMO. Call it the Cliffs Notes version of the western canon from Aristotle to the present.
C.S. Lewis also used nearly the same argument you arrived at to refute Materialism. If it’s all just random molecules colliding then that refutes the refutation. I can’t trust my refutation if that’s just the product of molecules and we’re right back to square one and nihilism.
Richard Smith in “Ideas Have Consequences” has made the claim that once William of Ockham gave up the argument on the existence of “Transcendents” that it was inevitable we would wind up here.
Stove blames Popper.
Wherever the “blame” lies, you’re doing the right thing by going the next step - let’s rebuild something durable on the ashes.
Amen, brother. (Also thanks for your subscription, much appreciated). I'll read Briggs book on your recommendation.
Happy to pay for that quality of writing. (Btw, You can get away with stopping at chapter 4. There’s a lot of math after that and I still need to brush up on my symbolic logic.) ;-)
Good to know! I’d need to brush up on mine too. 30 years out and most of my memory of such things is mush.
Did I miss an essay? So what is your proposed solution to the Trilemma?
For me, Rand's epistemology works. The conceptualist's point of view is too naval gazing for me - seems to be an intellectual's form of mental masturbation. But I am not well educated on all of this philosophy, so perhaps my take is that of a philosophical Luddite. ;-)
Put another way, the conceptualist's "we do not know whether or not our mental objects have any foundation outside of our minds in nature.” well, I suppose not but bankrupting sense making on something that is also unprovable lacks utility.
I do very much appreciate your work, I'm learning a lot.
You can find my thoughts here:
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/defending-against-the-trilemma
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/the-rarity-of-noesis
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/epistemology-is-a-puzzle
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/what-have-we-gotten-done
Thank you, that was kind.
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.
Your mentioning nihilism immediatly brought to mind David Chapman's (unfinished) webbook Meaningness - https://meaningness.com/