Hence the esteem held for mathematics in Greek philosophy. It was only in mathematics that ‘=’ could be unequivocably stated. Ordinary speec, and day-to-day circumstances, offers few such certainties.
Nozick’s quip has always amused me: Philosophers want an argument so powerful that, if you reject it, you die.
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I think circular explanations can often elucidate an issue adequately. For instance, if one teaches the water cycle, or respiration, even if one does not bring out how these cycles got started or when they might end, one has still understood quite a bit. We explain clouds and rain in turn of evaporation from water on the land, and we explain the replenishment of water on the land in terms of condensation, clouds, and rain. So, it might be problematic to have a wholly circular epistemology, but in terms of “justifying any given belief,” I think a circular answer can sometimes provide a fairly good explanation.
In terms of foundations built on self-evident principles, it just doesn’t seem like you can get much out of the principle of non-contradiction and the like alone. This is why wonder is often offered as the first principle of philosophy instead, “all men by nature desire to know.”
But it also leaves off the role of the first act of the mind in abstracting terms, which can be either clear or not clear (rather than true or false like premises). In this case, the opposite of the mind’s grasp of a simple term is not falsity (which requires judgement) but ignorance. Aristotle makes this distinction, and I think Robert Sokolowski does a good job with it in the Phenomenology of the Human Person. But it seems to me that terms and principles can also be grasped more or less fully, even as simple.
@Jay and @Banno, I think the point is more about our beliefs not always being choices (and then actions flow from beliefs). If I watch the Knicks win an NBA championship, I am incapable of simply willing myself into thinking that their championship drought has continued. If I see my car isn’t in my driveway, I cannot simply choose to believe it is there. But this can happen with inferences when we find the premises indubitable as well.
Certainly, we can choose to utter the words “no, there is my car right there in the driveway,” and then go out to try to start an imaginary car like a crazy person, but whether we can always delude ourselves so easily is another question. And this happens even without direct experience, when the weight of evidence and inference shatters attempts at denial.
Yes, religions are dogmas, the very thing skeptics argue are untenable. So a theist can’t ever adopt Agrippa’s trilemma.
St. Augustine had this to say about skepticism
- It is self-refuting
- It is impractical
- Even a full-blooded skeptic must have some beliefs
- Some truths can be known for certain
My thoughts were: in that case, Agrippa’s trilemma is also fallacious:
It’s a self-refuting argument. This is what your OP should criticize before we move on to finding a solution.
At the very least I’m glad that nobody’s opting for infinitism - that we should prove every proposition until the cows come home.
Yes, good. How should we characterize the difference? Is an inferentially correct conclusion subject to belief or disbelief in a way that the car in the driveway is not? To disbelieve such a conclusion we would call irrational or inconsistent; to disbelieve in the car’s absence we would probably call insane. What difference is being demarcated here?
@TheEudemian
Also, harking back to the OP, I realize I should have asked, “Would you agree that justifying a belief [not a truth] and proving a truth are not the same?” as this is the way @TheEudemian phrased it. “Justifying a truth” is a somewhat murky halfway house.
What is rational seems secondary to me. The bigger phenomenological distinction I’d like to lay out is that beliefs are sometimes not a matter of choice. This is not to say they never involve choice, but it can become quite impossible not to believe something on the weight of evidence, something many people have experienced when a friend or relative is accused on some infamy, etc., and supporting evidence is shown to them.
Likewise, the phenomenology of choice is not so simple as “we are not forced to any conclusion.” One can hardly choose to go out and start a car that isn’t in the driveway. There is also the phenomenology of weakness of will to consider, although this is different because there it does seem like choice is not wholly over ridden in most cases. Someone who violates a fast or diet doesn’t find themselves screaming for help as their hands autonomously reach for cake. Then again, at the extremes, say, willing oneself awake after long sleep deprivation, choice also seems to drop out.
And in terms of the will and desire, it is also the same way. Sometimes, it is simply not possible to choose to desire something, although sometimes it is.
Hence, the force I think people want arguments to have (and these are often not deductions, or not wholly so) is, ideally, that the premises are accepted and the inference determines belief. It is not that no other explanation is possible, e.g., “well maybe my husband has an evil identical twin I don’t know about,” or “maybe aliens made my car invisible,” but that other explanations are not believed.
This is not unlike how the skeptic seems congenitally unable to drive their car into oncoming traffic or to drive east in order to get to some destination to the west, despite claiming their beliefs are underdetermined with respect to these acts. So, maybe this could be cashed out as the informing of the intellect.
That makes a lot of sense. It seems well within our understanding of what “compulsory” or “binding” usually means that some beliefs may be compulsory under the right circumstances – or perhaps an even more precise word would be “involuntary,” or “unavoidable.”
There remain some interesting questions about what determines belief, but they’re ancillary to your point, I think.
To justify a conclusion is to provide an argument with premises; to demonstrate/prove a conclusion is to provide a demonstration with first principles. In the first case the reasons for believing the conclusion “hang” in suspension in some sense, for they are not ultimately tied down. Then for Aristotle there is a third class, enthymeme, where one is giving reasons informally and haphazardly.
So if someone believes that there are no first principles, then they believe justification exists but proof does not. Contemporary philosophers try to make up for this incoherence by trying to talk about strict tautologies as if they are meaningful, i.e. as if a deduction based in tautology is a proof.