• Agent Smith
    9.5k
    So, the story goes, the skeptic assumed the dogmatist's position and demonstrated with crystal clarity mind you that the dogmatist's stance led to an infinite regress thereby making their quest for real knowledge futile, a never ending task of justification for the justification for the justification for the justification ... ad infinitum.

    Agrippa the skeptic comes along and presents his now-famouus trilemma, an expansion pack to the infinite regress, and the rest is history.

    My half-complete solution to Agrippa's trilemma follows.

    It essentially boils down to complementarity, one type of the yin-yang dichotomy, the other being annihilatory.

    An example: X has money but doesn't know how to use it well. Y has no money but knows how to use it well. X would compensate for Y's deficit and vice versa. They would, in a sense, make up for each other's shortcomings, and united would be better than either of them alone.

    Assume reason to be yang which jibes with the masculinity it has been associated with for such a long time.

    What is the yin of/for reason?

    The best candidate as far as I can tell seems to be faith.

    Fidoratio

    I have faith in reason!

    I reason unto faith!
  • Yohan
    679
    You are giving a good pragmatic angle.
    Having reasonable amounts of doubt and faith can work well when using inductive reasoning..

    As far as duductive logic goes,
    "Everything needs a reason" itself requires justification. That itself would lead to infinite regress. Its a belief based on induction. "Everything I observe appears to be an effect of something else, so probably everything has a cause" or something like that. (cause and reason aren't exactly the same thing but...)
    "Some things don't require a reason" on the other hand, doesn't lead to infinite regress.

    The proof that "Some things just are without reason" is that the alternative is absurd. (Nothing would be knowable as everything would be based on infinite regresses)

    The belief that 'everything needs a reason' is an example of failing to understand the limits of reason. Is there a name for that?

    Excuse me if that is off somewhere. I feel I am making an error somehow but don't see where. If someone could point it out.

    I should also point out, reason is based on something a-rational? It comes from somewhere, doesn't it? Our first knowledge itself can't be rational. Rather, we have data and then we use reason to organize it. Though some say we can't have any data without already having some kind of rational framework in place to register data as data?
  • Nils Loc
    1.3k
    My half-complete solution to Agrippa's trilemma follows.Agent Smith

    Why can't we just be fine with the dogmatic horn of the trilemma. Axioms (provisional laws of thought) are the foundation for inferential knowledge.

    You have faith in axioms. :clap:
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    You have faith in axioms. :clap:Nils Loc

    :up:



    Yep, we can start from axioms but then that would be merely exploratory (of possibilities) rather than determinative (of actualities/facts). Remember axioms are only assumed to be true and hence if one finds that one/more are false, the entire corpus of inferences that were made from them will implode. In other words starting from axioms is to build on sand. Perhaps that's the whole point, oui monsieur? If philosophers were engineers, no one would live in the buildings they construct (astathmeta/unstable).
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