Some people watch basketball games. Some people follow the careers of celebrities. I worry about things like this:

Today, in my class on Jurisprudence, we were arguing about moral realism, and whether natural law fails as a theory of law due to the inherent difficulty or impossibility of arriving at some certain truth through moral reasoning. Finally! At last a class in which my field of study comes to be directly applicable.

I got to give the class a brief lesson on what is known as Agrippa’s Trilemma. Agrippa’s Trilemma states that when seeking the origins of any conclusion through the reasoning process, a reasoner will run into the difficulty of expressing his conclusion as truth. The trilemma issue says that there are three ways to try to get around the problem of expressing a conclusion as truth, and that all three ways suffer from a flaw that renders the ultimate conclusion uncertain.

The first horn of the trilemma is that a claim will rest upon an infinite regression of other claims. For instance, suppose that I say that “The sky is currently blue over Topeka, Kansas.” A skeptic could ask me how it is that I am so certain that my statement comports with truth. I might reply that I know that my statement is true because I can directly observe the sky right now above Topeka, Kansas, and that I see its color to be blue. The skeptic could again ask how I could be sure of each of those claims (that I can observe the sky right now, and that I observe it to be blue). I might engage in a discourse about the nature of biology, optical color, space-time, or any other number of topics, but in every single case, the skeptic could simply repeat his question for the new set of statements and have a valid case for doing so at every single juncture. Thus, there could be an infinite regress through the argument’s structure to attempt to find the Archimedean lever on which the whole structure is founded, and such an attempt would ultimately fail to find that foundation because it would never reach the end.

The second attempt to escape the horn involves finding a way to stop the infinite regression of evidences by finding some truths to be based upon themselves. A tautology (circular reasoning) is always true, logically, but may have absolutely no basis in reality. A circular argument in one in which the conclusion assumes the truth of the conclusion in the attempt to prove the conclusion itself. Hence, while a circular argument might very well be internally valid, there would be no way to escape from the circular nature of the argument, which again leaves the skeptic without a foundation upon which to rest his foe’s claims.

The final horn of the trilemma is one that establishes a firm foundation for the reasoning, but which is ultimately unsatisfying. At some point in the infinite regress of requests for evidences, the reasoner simply pulls a ‘this far and no further’ argument, cutting off discussion. Ex cathedra reasoning provides firm foundations, but their firmness is placed beyond question by the reasoner and he resists all attempts to question that base for his further reasoning.

I have wrestled with this issue and decided that all epistemological systems appear to rely on the third horn of the trilemma. At some point, there are simply claims which are made for which no evidences are provided. This is the nature of my reliance on rules of cause and effect. Any attempt to provide an evidence for rules of cause and effect itself would presuppose the truth of the law of cause and effect, so the law of cause and effect must be placed beyond the scope of valid questioning, ex cathedra.

Curiously, Agrippa’s Trilemma is self-defeating since it relies on laws of logic whose certainty is defeated by the Trilemma.

Foundationalists, like myself, can’t really definitively judge any other moral or reasoning system – even religious faith – based upon the infirmities of their foundations, since the foundations of someone who follows a different epistemological system (like empiricism) rest upon equally unproved grounds. Indeed, one cannot even validly make a claim that the views of others are internally inconsistent, since the very nature of doing so involves assuming the truth of the laws of logic (namely the truth of the law of the excluded middle, which would divide the world into things that are X or not-X, thus meaning that a an internally inconsistent statement is not true).

I am yet unsure how to deal with this epistemological problem, since it ultimately amounts to a critique of the reasoning process itself. Such a critique would render unintelligible the universe around us, since language, perception, reason, science, and every other human endeavor rely on the truth of the very principles whose truth we are unable to actually show.

It seems apparent to me that we must be able to rely on reason in order to function. Any attempt to negate that last statement seems to me to run into the difficulty of living (and not living at the same time) in an existence (and not existence at the same time) that contains (and doesn’t contain at the same time) a person (who is also not a person) who is in front of you (and also not in front of you at the same time). Quickly one gets the idea that functioning in such a universe becomes impossible. On a practical level, then, the only potential solution to this problem (although not from a theoretical level) is to ensure homogeneity of ‘first principles’ from which reasoners may begin. How to achieve that result, though, is not yet clear to me.