Talk:Münchhausen trilemma
Philosophy: Logic Unassessed | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Agrippa's Trilemma
I suggest renaming this page to Agrippa's Trilemma after Agrippa the Sceptic. Spirals31 (talk) 22:50, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
Reductio ad absurdum?
Does anyone know how Albert, or other defenders of skepticism, respond to the claim that a reductio ad absurdum (contradiction derived from the denial of a claim) proves a claim, apparently using none of the methods discussed in the trilemma? Aristotle gives some further support to this method, suggesting that anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction and demand "proof" for it "is like a plant,"--if they do not admit that p excludes not-p, this simply shows that they don't know what p (or propositions in general) mean, and you can simply ignore them. This seems to be an effective way out of the trilemma; whether it can be extended beyond trivial logical claims is another question of course.--ScottForschler (talk) 20:18, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
I'm not a professional philosopher, but I'll take a stab. I think that reductio ad absurdum is supposed to be a method of deducing new facts from a set of existing facts. In terms of the Trilemma, one might ask what your justification is for believing the original set of facts--if they are not valid, neither will the newly deduced facts necessarily be valid. Furthermore, one might ask what the justification is for believing that reductio ad absurdum actually works--that is, certainly deduces new facts from old ones. Etcetera. Mkcmkc (talk) 16:12, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
- I'm not sure how Albert or others would respond, but transcendental arguments have indeed been but forward (by philosophers such as P. F. Strawson, A. C. Grayling and Jaakko Hintikka) as a defeater against ontic and-or epistemic skepticism. A transcendental argument against the trilemma may be something like:
- One has no justification for holding the trilemma if the trilemma is true (since no belief can be justified)
- --it can't even be said to be "more likely" than some alternative, since whatever criteria of "likelyhood" is applied is also ultimately unjustified.
- Every meaningful belief is justified (this can be shown in various ways--if this premise is denied then the whole force of the trilemma is nullified--if unjustified beliefs can be meaningful, then it doesn't matter whether justification is possible for some belief X, since some other criteria of meaning is applied).
- So to affirm belief in the trilemma is meaningful presopposes some standard of justification which the trilemma satisfies.
- So to affirm belief the trilemma is to deny the validity of the trilemma.
- So the trilemma should not be believed.
- One has no justification for holding the trilemma if the trilemma is true (since no belief can be justified)
- That's just a quick and sloppy version, better arguments can be formulated. 24.243.3.27 (talk) 15:13, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
Trilemma
I dont understand how _five_ tropes work out to be a trilemma...
Godel
Isn't this basically the same as Godel's incompleteness theorems? 86.150.214.95 (talk) 01:27, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
- Not really. Godel's incompleteness theorems posit (basically) that no formal system is able to completely describe itself in terms of it's own axioms. This posits that certainty (as a property of propositions) is logically impossible. Godel is a theory about the properties of formal systems; this is a theory about the nature of proofs. I.e., Godel doesn't say that nothing can be proven in a given formal system, this does. 24.243.3.27 (talk) 23:08, 24 March 2009 (UTC)