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In epistemology, the Münchhausen trilemma is a thought experiment intended to demonstrate the theoretical impossibility of proving any truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics, without appealing to accepted assumptions. If it is asked how any given proposition is known to be true, proof in support of that proposition may be provided. Yet that same question can be asked of that supporting proof, and any subsequent supporting proof. The Münchhausen trilemma is that there are only three ways of completing a proof:

  • The circular argument, in which the proof of some proposition presupposes the truth of that very proposition
  • The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum
  • The dogmatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts which are merely asserted rather than defended

The trilemma, then, is the decision among the three equally unsatisfying options. Karl Popper's suggestion was to accept the trilemma as unsolvable and work with knowledge by way of conjecture and criticism.

Source: Münchhausen trilemma - Wikipedia

Suppose that two persons, X and Y, are asked the same question "why do you believe what you believe?", and for each justification they offer, they are subsequently asked the question "why?".

Suppose also that both X and Y avoid circular arguments and infinite regresses. Thus, their chains of justification (or DAGs, to allow for potential branching in the justification process while avoiding cycles) end up terminating, in one way or another, in dogmatic assumptions.

Considering this, are X and Y equally rational, no matter what dogmatic assumptions they adopt as their stopping points? What if X, for example, decides to adopt theistic dogmatic assumptions, whereas Y decides to adopt naturalistic ones?

Furthermore, suppose that we attempt to break the symmetry between X and Y by adopting a meta-criterion to assess the rationality of their dogmatic assumptions. Wouldn't this meta-criterion also suffer from the same justification issues highlighted by the Münchhausen trilemma? Would we need to come up with meta-dogmas in order to justify our meta-criterion, and meta-meta-criteria to justify those meta-dogmas, and meta-meta-dogmas to justify those meta-meta-criteria, and meta-meta-meta-criteria to justify those meta-meta-dogmas, and so on and so forth ad infinitum?

Mark
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    The trilemma assumes that propositions can be justified one at a time, and only by other propositions. It is more typical that justification applies to entire conceptions and is grounded in judgments supported non-propositionally, through interactions with reality (perceptual, instrumental and whatever other ones one admits). The usual standard of justification is not rationality but reasonableness, which in addition requires that the judgments be sound. Whether dogmatic judgments are sound depends on whether they are backed by practice, broadly construed, that grounds them. – Conifold Mar 29 '24 at 17:48
  • Answering this requires a standard that is independent from those two. So it ultimately depends on what axioms one believes in by default. The problem with the specific example of naturalism vs. theism though is this: the assumptions that underpin each belief aren’t mutually exclusive. Theists who posit that rational belief in god does not require evidence such as reformed epistemologists often limit this to God but not anything else that they believe in. They are often evidentialists with respect to everything else, just like most naturalists. So arguably, it is mere special pleading. – Baby_philosopher Mar 29 '24 at 18:30
  • @Baby_philosopher I personally lean towards an evidentialist/mystical interpretation of reformed epistemology, namely, that belief in God can be grounded in the direct experience of God (hence, the belief is properly basic, without requiring further justification). Just like you don't need further justification in order to trust your experience of the external world, your memories, your mother, etc. So, at least as I see it, no special pleading is involved. – Mark Mar 29 '24 at 20:49
  • @Mark Fair enough but then that becomes special pleading of a certain kind of experience. If you had an experience of seeing a goblin, a fairy, a leprechaun, Pikachu, a 10 headed monster, big foot, or the devil, would you consider all of those beliefs properly basic grounded in those experiences? I’m going to assume not, and I’m going to assume it would be because your mind would consider the possibility of hallucinations, drugs, or mental illness. Presumably, you don’t consider these factors relevant when observing your mother. Hence, I’d argue it’s still special pleading for god. – Baby_philosopher Mar 29 '24 at 22:59
  • By the way, I do want to say you seem to always ask the same type of questions that I’m interested in. It’s like you’re the theist me – Baby_philosopher Mar 29 '24 at 23:03
  • @Baby_philosopher In the absence of a defeater, if those entities enter the conscious awareness of a person in a way that they become undeniably real to them, just like your mother is real to you, such a person would be completely rational in believing those entities exist by my lights. In this context, a defeater would have to be some kind of compelling, sound proof that they were in fact hallucinating, or, if you want to entertain some theology here, that they were being deceived by a devil (see discernment of spirits). – Mark Mar 29 '24 at 23:53
  • @Baby_philosopher Analogously, a defeater for the existence of your mother could be, for example, Morpheus unplugging you from the Matrix and showing you that it was all an illusion of a simulated virtual reality. – Mark Mar 29 '24 at 23:54
  • @Baby_philosopher Before Morpheus saving you from the Matrix, your belief in your mother would be rational. After Morpheus's intervention, your unbelief in your mother (from the Matrix) would be rational. – Mark Mar 30 '24 at 00:05
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    @Conifold - What you describe is an empirical principle of increasing confidence based on evidential justification. This is one possible pragmatic response to Munchausen's trilemma, but it explicitly runs afoul of one of the other legs. The pragmatic empirical methodology of justification is only itself justified thru pragmatic empiricism, hence is circular. As are all coherentist "solutions" that the name of the Trilemma ridicules. – Dcleve Mar 30 '24 at 14:42
  • @Mark But when do those clear experiences happen? When do people regularly claim to see God or a divine like being if they do not have a history of mental illness, are not in a druglike state, and do not have any other deficiencies in memory/competence that can be tested elsewhere? When do they themselves claim that the clarity in which they see these things is the same clarity in which they see their mother? Are there widespread accounts of people seeing some of these deities on a daily basis while they are awake, without any prior mental illness, while they go about their day? – Baby_philosopher Mar 30 '24 at 16:07
  • Of course I haven’t sifted through all the different testimonies, but tons of these experiences occur as OBE’s, NDEs, after intense meditative practices, after drugs, during schizophrenia, etc. In fact, you can simply do a test. Out of all the reported episodes of daily/frequent sightings of some supernatural entity by the same person, what % of those occurrences occur during one of these earlier mentioned circumstances? Without even reading every single testimony, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that this percentage would be very high. The average person doesn’t see deities every day – Baby_philosopher Mar 30 '24 at 16:10
  • @Dcleve Yup, his entire point is circular and amounts to “you can escape the trilemma by escaping the trilemma”. It would be better to simply admit that relying on certain things such as perception does not evade the trilemma, but that it is useful for practical purposes, instead of falsely claiming that the trilemma makes false assumptions. It doesn’t – Baby_philosopher Mar 30 '24 at 16:13
  • @Dcleve "Pragmatic empirical methodology" is not justified by itself as a proposition, it is justified non-propositionally through practice. So it is not coherentist either, and is not of the type the trilemma covers. The meta move you are trying to make ruins the trilemma altogether. It presupposes a methodology of justification (deductive propositional) for the reductio, the reductio does not apply when this presupposition does not hold. – Conifold Mar 30 '24 at 21:29

3 Answers3

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Your criteria of rationalism to evaluate two responses to the Trilemma is, itself suspect. Rationalism is -- not rationally justified. See this question and answer: Logic and its beginnings and why it is

My belief is that between logical pluralism, and the Trilemma, that rationalism (and hence Analytic philosophy) is fatally compromised, and ultimately all valid responses to the Trilemma have to adopt pragmatism of one kind or another. See this answer: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/64646/29339

One pragmatic response is to accept that no justifications are ever complete, hence there is not chain of justifications with a termination, there is only a network of better or less justified assumptions, that eventually trickles out into assumptions that are generally not even recognized. This pragmatic network of justifications are generally based on methodological naturalism/empiricism, at least in the West, but the justifications of empiricism are circular, so there is another leg that is also usually being resorted to. The Popperian solution is to treat ALL justifications as incomplete, always -- and subject to revisiting in the future.

There is no consistently reliable way to measure or otherwise apply a metric between two such networks of decreasingly supported assumptions. This is illustrated with Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, the way the Verification Principle refutes itself, the way Fasifiability fails Fasification, Popper's own failure to develop a valid criteria of Versimilitude, and Lakatos' failure to develop a valid criteria to measure progressivity or regressivity of a Research Programme.

What we have, as the best alternative I know of, is that searchers of good will and honest intentions can dialog, questioning each others assumptions, and apply their best judgement to the validity of the answers. This process requires intellectual honesty, and openmindedness, to be successful. Both philosophy and religion tend to attract absolutists and ideologues, which means an unfortunately large number of dialog partners may not meet the criteria for this method to be successful.

Dcleve
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As a preliminary, let us note that building up a structure of reason from the ground need not be dogmatic. Dogmatic carries somewhat pejorative tones as resistant to reason. In a debate between an atheist and a priest, it may very well be that either the atheist or the priest or both may be dogmatic. I think the term you are searching for is foundational, as in foundationalism:

Foundationalism concerns philosophical theories of knowledge resting upon non-inferential justified belief, or some secure foundation of certainty such as a conclusion inferred from a basis of sound premises.

Second, you're in very nebulous semantics with the phrase "are equally rational" because devising a metric for rationality is no small feat. What does it mean to be reasonable or rational to begin with? Robert Audi has written The Architecture of Reason (GB) and provides a theory on the matter. And Robert Audi is but one epistemologist.

Even if two persons both have a foundational argument, there is an exhausting list on how the use of reason might differ between two parties: differences in knowledge of facts, differences in use warrant and rebuttal, linguistic sophistication, etc. What constitutes an effective rubric of rationality? That's hard to say. Whether or not an argument is easy to digest as a DAG with a root and leaf nodes is somewhat irrelevant, TBH.

One could consider the types of logic that each party uses. If one arguer is a high school student and relies on informal logic in natural language, and the other arguer is a professional logician who can rely on formal and non-classical logics and has a detailed knowledge of fallacy and theory, then the argument could be made that whether the argument relies on regress, foundations, or circularities is somewhat orthogonal to rationality all together. The primary characteristic, then is not argument structure, but rather then use and application of inference moving from premises to conclusion.

Lastly, consider that the topic in question may have a role in regards to rationality. Is the argument over the philosophy of quantum physics in which new discoveries play an important role? Perhaps the logician in our scenario refuses to admit new evidence because of confirmation bias. Then, indeed, this dogmatism might impact an assay of rationality. Thus, a younger student might not have the same mastery of inference, but at the same time accept some important defeaters that an more conservative thinker refuses to recognize.

Ultimately, rationality is multidimensional. So without more details, it's hard to commit to an answer to this question. It might be helpful to familiarize yourself with some contemporaneous thinking on the matter. Consider The Oxford Handbook of Rationality (GB). There are some SEP articles that might be of interest:

Remember, being rational is a subjective claim, because logic itself is goal driven and very subjective in its application.

J D
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  • I borrowed the term 'dogmatic' from the third bullet point in the quote from the Wikipedia article: "The dogmatic* argument, which rests on accepted precepts which are merely asserted rather than defended"* – Mark Mar 29 '24 at 22:26
  • @Mark As long as you don't equivocate given the polysemy of the term! :D – J D Mar 29 '24 at 22:52
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I find it slightly ironic that your question presupposes that an infinite regress is associated with any attempt to to determine whether two positions are equally rational, yet you still expect a definitive answer!

Yes, whatever criteria you use to determine whether a particular dogmatic view is more or less rational than another, someone could challenge you to justify your criteria and you will eventually have to resort to your own dogma for the justification.

If you reflect upon the process by which a person decides whether a thing is reasonable, you ought to conclude that many factors are involved, and some of them inevitably are the result of the person's upbringing, social milieu, education and so on. People develop their beliefs from birth onwards, based on countless experiences and inputs. Many of our beliefs are held unselfconsciously- I suspect you believe, for example, that when you walk down a street you are unlikely to find the ground vanish beneath you. That will not be a belief you will have consciously arrived at through analysis of what is more or less reasonable to believe- you will have formed the belief on auto-pilot, as it were, from having repeatedly and consistently experienced the ground as something solid. You will have thousands of other beliefs that you have acquired in a similarly uncritical way. I imagine, for example, that you belief the Earth is not flat, that the arctic is colder than the Sahara, that Paris is the capital of France, because you have absorbed that sort of information consistently through your life. You might first have been taught at school that Paris was the capital of France, having earlier been conditioned to assume that what teachers tell you is correct, and thereafter your belief in the fact will have been buttressed again and again in other ways, for example, by seeing Paris mentioned on TV, or reading about it in books etc.

In short, you acquire views of the world from an interlocking set of inputs and experiences, each of which you have been found to be consistent with many others. It is against that set of beliefs that you will form conclusions about whether other proposals are reasonable. If I am asked to say whether a naturalistic or theistic view is more reasonable, I will tend to favour the naturalistic, because I find theistic beliefs to be implausible in the context of my personal belief system. However, someone raised to be religious might take the opposite view. There is no absolute way to say which is more rational, and that is why the same old arguments about the existence of god continue century after century.

Marco Ocram
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