Yes, epistemology has been aware of the Agrippa's trilemma since forever: arguments can only 1-relate backward ad infinitum, 2-be circular, or 3-rely on arbitrary postulates.
Yes, science relies on arbitrary postulates that are simply assumed to be true (things like "something exists").
Feel free to dismiss every scientific statement based on that, but it's nothing new.
>Nobody has to assume something exists. You can check. And if you're ever able to falsify it, science demands you overturn your assumption.
I don't think they mean you assume a specific thing exists, I think they mean assume things exist at all. You need to assume there is an outside world -- that Descartes' 'evil genius' is not to be blamed for our experiences -- in order to 'check' anything.
There is no way to explain or talk about anything at all without making assumptions. You need to, at minimum, assume: there is a world outside of our experiences; our experiences give us some sort of reasonable access to that world; things generally work via consistent rules of cause and effect (even if sometimes very complicated), etc.
It does not make sense to argue that you need to 'prove' any of those things, because the very notion of proof is itself predicated on them. If things do not work by regular cause and effect; if we have no access to an outside world via our senses, there is simply no way to argue for the truth of falsity of anything at all. You can choose to just reject these assumptions, but you can't then turn around and say that they need to be justified a-circularly via your own circular argument.
Science does not rely on assumptions and then derive reality from axioms.
Science is a process of finding out whether your guesses are correct and abandoning them if you can show they arent. This same process is self-correcting to foundational theories because no theory is above falsification.
If you can falsify naturalism, then do so.
So far, naturalism is capable of explaining everything we understand well enough to test.
Frankly, the alternatives are inherently incoherent. Either the supernatural can be understood by a physical human brain and fully communicated to another human brain by characters on a computer screen (text) — and can therefore be accounted for within the natural world. Or it cannot be understood by a physical human brain, and therefore claims made about it are nonsensical by necessity.
wether it does or not, science has worked. So at best the argument goes something like:
> "the method you've put your faith in for determining truths about nature might have put a man on the moon and built laptop computers and low temperature superconductors and cured all kind of diseases, but its still ultimately self referential and built on top on unprovable axioms and circular logic. I have a different system of knowledge that is none of these things its called the transcendental argument for god and it has never delivered any tangible results BUT a subset of the philosophers and theologians who care about this stuff believe that it avoids agrippas trilema!"
My response to that is that ill just go with naturalism anyway thank you very much
Let's clear up a few ideas, strap in because this is going to be a long one.
>“you have a assumption technically called a presupposition. It's a framework a rule set you view the world through. Yours is naturalism. You see a fossil data as you interpret it through your framework naturalism. The fossil doesn't say anything it doesn't come with a name tag and bio telling you anything about itself. You use theory based on your framework naturalism to make a theory laden outcome evolution. Evolution makes sense in the framework of naturalism...
So it's false that interpreting the fossil record relies on naturalism, here presumably defined as something like: science is the best (only) guide to truth about the world. You could for example be a scientific antirealist (science doesn't tell us true things about the world it's just practically useful for making predictions about it) and still interpret the fosil record as supporting evolution.
The commenter does however say something that's true. Fossils, streaks in the cloud chamber, temperature gauges etc. don't say anything by themselves you're always working within a certain theory which tells you how to interpret this information. Evolution as a theory will tell you how to interpret fossils. What the commenter is mistaken about is that evolution is just a presupposition.
What a theory like evolution does is give certain predictions and explains observations and those observations manifesting gives us reason to think the theory is true.
So theories and observations have a mutual relationship summed up like this: 1. a theory implies and explains some observations 2. in this way it gives us the ability to interpret those observations 3. the observations then give us reason to think the theory is true.
>...It doesn't prove the framework is correct...
Theories are going to be judged by the criteria is described above: how well they explain certain observations, predict new ones + certain theoretical virtues like simplicity, coherence, fertility etc.
>The very same data the fossil now has an entire different theory because data the fossil is underdetermined...
Given what we said, its not at all a problem that several theories can explain the same data set; we don't only judge theories based on how much they cohere with the observations (that would be an incredibly low bar), we also judge them on their predictive power and theoretical virtue and how well it explains those observations. Yes both evolution and creationism can explain the same data, but one clearly does it better with less ad hoc explanations. Given these criteria evolution is obviously the winner and hence we endorse it as true.
>“A presupposition like naturalism is the untestable rule book that dictates what counts as testing, evidence and data in the first place. You can test a hypothesis with data you cannot use data to test the naturalistic rulebook you used to gather that data. Justify your rulebook naturalism without circular reasoning.”
Here we have gone one more rung up the epistemic ladder. Now instead of saying that a particular theory is unjustified (like earlier) we say that our criteria of theory selections itself is unjustified; we have no reason to think a theory which has more predictive and explanatory power is better.
I think this idea is on the face of it absurd. But the commenter is making what I take to be a skeptical argument, which is reinforced by the following...
>“Then when asked directing on their worldview they have this to say “TAG is the only way out of the criterion problem and the trilemma. Specifically the Orthodox Christian version. You have to go
transcendental.
Likely referring to Agrippa's trilemma: if we ask how a belief is justified we can only reply with another belief, but then we have to justify that belief in turn. It seems like then justification can go one of 3 ways; either is goes on forever (infinite regress), or it circles back to the original belief (circularity), or end in a certain belief which is not itself justified.
Saying we have to go transcendental is saying the only way out of this trilemma is through God. But that's just one (rather unconvincing) way out of the problem. Notice that we already outlined 3 answers in the description to the dilemma; either justification just does in fact go on forever (infinitism), or its circular (coherentism) or some beliefs are just foundational (foundationalism), and many philosophers have take up the task of grounding epistemology in this way without reference to god.
A particularly relevant response to the problem was penned by arguably the most famous philosopher of science of the 20th century Willard van Orman Quine in his paper Epistemology Naturalised which I strongy recommend. Quines claim is that science can take care of itself, it does not need an external first philosophy prior to it in order to justify science, for there is no such first philosophy and so worrying about circularity is pointless.
But why all this creative reconstruction, all this makebelieve? The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology? Such a surrender of the epistemological burden to psychology is a move that was disallowed in earlier times as circular reasoning. If the epistemologist's goal is validation of the grounds of empirical science, he defeats his purpose by using psychology or other empirical science in the validation. However, such scruples against circularity have little point once we have stopped dreaming of deducing science from observations. If we are out simply to understand the link between observation and science, we are well advised to use any available information, including that provided by the very science whose link with observation we are seeking to understand. (Quine, 1969)
“How do you justify the knowledge based rule set framework of naturalism”
Answer: because it’s the only framework which has been proven to consistently work. Naturalism is so unchallenged among scientists that it’s almost invisible. This isn’t a failure of understanding among scientists. It’s a testimony to the fact that no other philosophical viewpoint has been able to make a credible challenge to Naturalism.
The philosophy of science and the practice of science don’t actually have that much to do with each other anymore. I’m not dissing philosophy here: just recognizing that it’s a different toolset for a different set of questions.
The philosophy of science is for talking about how we think about and talk about science. But it’s not actually useful for doing science - and I say that as someone with an interest in the philosophical questions, but also a career spanning decades of successful scientific research.
Vegetable-Dust-780 | 2 hours ago
I don’t think this is the sub for this kind of religious preaching
knockingatthegate | 58 minutes ago
Isn’t OP asking for help addressing those who are doing the religious preaching?
233C | an hour ago
Yes, epistemology has been aware of the Agrippa's trilemma since forever: arguments can only 1-relate backward ad infinitum, 2-be circular, or 3-rely on arbitrary postulates.
Yes, science relies on arbitrary postulates that are simply assumed to be true (things like "something exists").
Feel free to dismiss every scientific statement based on that, but it's nothing new.
fox-mcleod | an hour ago
No it doesn't. Science relies on theories not axioms. The difference being theories are always held only tentatively and always up for correction.
Nobody has to assume something exists. You can check. And if you're ever able to falsify it, science demands you overturn your assumption.
Science is not a mathematical or formal logic field like math. The name for that error is called indictivism. Instead, science relies on abduction.
parsonsrazersupport | 51 minutes ago
>Nobody has to assume something exists. You can check. And if you're ever able to falsify it, science demands you overturn your assumption.
I don't think they mean you assume a specific thing exists, I think they mean assume things exist at all. You need to assume there is an outside world -- that Descartes' 'evil genius' is not to be blamed for our experiences -- in order to 'check' anything.
smashfalcon | an hour ago
It would be a pretty weird coincidence if it was built on arbitrary presuppositions yet it all worked perfectly
parsonsrazersupport | an hour ago
There is no way to explain or talk about anything at all without making assumptions. You need to, at minimum, assume: there is a world outside of our experiences; our experiences give us some sort of reasonable access to that world; things generally work via consistent rules of cause and effect (even if sometimes very complicated), etc.
It does not make sense to argue that you need to 'prove' any of those things, because the very notion of proof is itself predicated on them. If things do not work by regular cause and effect; if we have no access to an outside world via our senses, there is simply no way to argue for the truth of falsity of anything at all. You can choose to just reject these assumptions, but you can't then turn around and say that they need to be justified a-circularly via your own circular argument.
fox-mcleod | an hour ago
This is the inductivist error.
Science does not rely on assumptions and then derive reality from axioms.
Science is a process of finding out whether your guesses are correct and abandoning them if you can show they arent. This same process is self-correcting to foundational theories because no theory is above falsification.
If you can falsify naturalism, then do so.
So far, naturalism is capable of explaining everything we understand well enough to test.
Frankly, the alternatives are inherently incoherent. Either the supernatural can be understood by a physical human brain and fully communicated to another human brain by characters on a computer screen (text) — and can therefore be accounted for within the natural world. Or it cannot be understood by a physical human brain, and therefore claims made about it are nonsensical by necessity.
ababababababacus | an hour ago
wether it does or not, science has worked. So at best the argument goes something like:
> "the method you've put your faith in for determining truths about nature might have put a man on the moon and built laptop computers and low temperature superconductors and cured all kind of diseases, but its still ultimately self referential and built on top on unprovable axioms and circular logic. I have a different system of knowledge that is none of these things its called the transcendental argument for god and it has never delivered any tangible results BUT a subset of the philosophers and theologians who care about this stuff believe that it avoids agrippas trilema!"
My response to that is that ill just go with naturalism anyway thank you very much
Edgar_Brown | an hour ago
Science relies on one presupposition alone: reality is real, and we all live in it.
That’s all it needs to build the whole edifice simply by using weaponized doubt and intersubjective phenomena.
Moral_Conundrums | an hour ago
Let's clear up a few ideas, strap in because this is going to be a long one.
>“you have a assumption technically called a presupposition. It's a framework a rule set you view the world through. Yours is naturalism. You see a fossil data as you interpret it through your framework naturalism. The fossil doesn't say anything it doesn't come with a name tag and bio telling you anything about itself. You use theory based on your framework naturalism to make a theory laden outcome evolution. Evolution makes sense in the framework of naturalism...
So it's false that interpreting the fossil record relies on naturalism, here presumably defined as something like: science is the best (only) guide to truth about the world. You could for example be a scientific antirealist (science doesn't tell us true things about the world it's just practically useful for making predictions about it) and still interpret the fosil record as supporting evolution.
The commenter does however say something that's true. Fossils, streaks in the cloud chamber, temperature gauges etc. don't say anything by themselves you're always working within a certain theory which tells you how to interpret this information. Evolution as a theory will tell you how to interpret fossils. What the commenter is mistaken about is that evolution is just a presupposition.
What a theory like evolution does is give certain predictions and explains observations and those observations manifesting gives us reason to think the theory is true.
So theories and observations have a mutual relationship summed up like this: 1. a theory implies and explains some observations 2. in this way it gives us the ability to interpret those observations 3. the observations then give us reason to think the theory is true.
>...It doesn't prove the framework is correct...
Theories are going to be judged by the criteria is described above: how well they explain certain observations, predict new ones + certain theoretical virtues like simplicity, coherence, fertility etc.
>The very same data the fossil now has an entire different theory because data the fossil is underdetermined...
Given what we said, its not at all a problem that several theories can explain the same data set; we don't only judge theories based on how much they cohere with the observations (that would be an incredibly low bar), we also judge them on their predictive power and theoretical virtue and how well it explains those observations. Yes both evolution and creationism can explain the same data, but one clearly does it better with less ad hoc explanations. Given these criteria evolution is obviously the winner and hence we endorse it as true.
>“A presupposition like naturalism is the untestable rule book that dictates what counts as testing, evidence and data in the first place. You can test a hypothesis with data you cannot use data to test the naturalistic rulebook you used to gather that data. Justify your rulebook naturalism without circular reasoning.”
Here we have gone one more rung up the epistemic ladder. Now instead of saying that a particular theory is unjustified (like earlier) we say that our criteria of theory selections itself is unjustified; we have no reason to think a theory which has more predictive and explanatory power is better.
I think this idea is on the face of it absurd. But the commenter is making what I take to be a skeptical argument, which is reinforced by the following...
>“Then when asked directing on their worldview they have this to say “TAG is the only way out of the criterion problem and the trilemma. Specifically the Orthodox Christian version. You have to go
transcendental.
Likely referring to Agrippa's trilemma: if we ask how a belief is justified we can only reply with another belief, but then we have to justify that belief in turn. It seems like then justification can go one of 3 ways; either is goes on forever (infinite regress), or it circles back to the original belief (circularity), or end in a certain belief which is not itself justified.
Saying we have to go transcendental is saying the only way out of this trilemma is through God. But that's just one (rather unconvincing) way out of the problem. Notice that we already outlined 3 answers in the description to the dilemma; either justification just does in fact go on forever (infinitism), or its circular (coherentism) or some beliefs are just foundational (foundationalism), and many philosophers have take up the task of grounding epistemology in this way without reference to god.
A particularly relevant response to the problem was penned by arguably the most famous philosopher of science of the 20th century Willard van Orman Quine in his paper Epistemology Naturalised which I strongy recommend. Quines claim is that science can take care of itself, it does not need an external first philosophy prior to it in order to justify science, for there is no such first philosophy and so worrying about circularity is pointless.
But why all this creative reconstruction, all this makebelieve? The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology? Such a surrender of the epistemological burden to psychology is a move that was disallowed in earlier times as circular reasoning. If the epistemologist's goal is validation of the grounds of empirical science, he defeats his purpose by using psychology or other empirical science in the validation. However, such scruples against circularity have little point once we have stopped dreaming of deducing science from observations. If we are out simply to understand the link between observation and science, we are well advised to use any available information, including that provided by the very science whose link with observation we are seeking to understand. (Quine, 1969)
After_Network_6401 | an hour ago
“How do you justify the knowledge based rule set framework of naturalism”
Answer: because it’s the only framework which has been proven to consistently work. Naturalism is so unchallenged among scientists that it’s almost invisible. This isn’t a failure of understanding among scientists. It’s a testimony to the fact that no other philosophical viewpoint has been able to make a credible challenge to Naturalism.
The philosophy of science and the practice of science don’t actually have that much to do with each other anymore. I’m not dissing philosophy here: just recognizing that it’s a different toolset for a different set of questions.
The philosophy of science is for talking about how we think about and talk about science. But it’s not actually useful for doing science - and I say that as someone with an interest in the philosophical questions, but also a career spanning decades of successful scientific research.
knockingatthegate | 2 hours ago
What are you asking?