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Münchhausen trilemma

Source: public/assets/writing/philosophy/Münchhausen trilemma.docx · philosophy

An introduction to the horror of the Münchhausen trilemma

There seems to be a hole at the bottom of logic



In today’s episode we will show that:

In a sense arguing about *objective* morality (or anything) from a court of reason is basically just asserting dogma at one another.

Yet another example of not being able to derive what we ought to do (from a rationalist stance)

It’s probably better to not think about epistemology

I. Can you fly by pulling up on your ears?

Consider the following:

You are a recent graduate of high school, who presents as unusually attractive, humble, and pretentious. As you walk through the countryside, though your steps usually betray the steady nature of your lithe frame, you trip and fall in a quagmire of mud while out for a walk. With nothing around that you can grab hold of, and sinking quickly, you make a desperate choice to grab both of your ears and tug hard.

Now, although you are comically muscular, you wouldn’t expect to be able to start flying out of the quagmire, right? Yet, for any proof within mathematics or Logic, and ideas reliant on making ought (imperative) claims from truth about reality (i.e. that small thing we call objective morality) this is precisely it seems what one must do.





Likewise, a work of indulgent, unapologetic fiction



Thus is the Münchhausen trilemma (or insight).

II. Three methods of proof walk into a bar asking for some high proof (they want to forget where they came from)

There are only really three ways of providing justification to a proof within Mathematics:

The first is that this proof supports another proof, which in turn supports that proof. This is called circular reasoning. Some might add more, interconnected webs of proofs to this.

The second is that this proof is supported by another proof, which is supported by another proof which is… and so on in an infinite regress. In practice this is impossible to do.

The third is dogma, foundationalism, axioms. You don’t really defend why it’s true, you just say “yeah I assume this to be true” (lol deal with it).

Unfortunately, none of this actually leads to any proof about how it is ultimately real:

Circular reasoning is just when the premise is the same as the conclusion, which proves nothing. Likewise for a web of beliefs that support each other.

x ∵ x

A line of infinite regress does not seem possible to implement or perhaps even exist

x ∵ …

Foundationalism is wonderful and what mathematics relies on

y ∵ x

unfortunately, for the obvious reason that simply because I assert something does not mean it is true (no matter how stylish I am), this also fails as justification.

Now, an astute reader such as yourself (only matched in wit by myself), might notice that while I talked about math, the same goes for literally any claim. Try it. There are very few claims that run outside of this, along the lines of Cogito Ergo Sum, but other than this (and even this could be my confusion), there are few–no halting foundational claims. Strange.

III. What’s that got to do with the Price of Salmon in Rizhao (does it even matter bro)?

Sure, the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR; our silly little idea that knowledge isn't knowledge unless it is justified) calls for it, and within the history books of knowledge you used to want a True Belief to also be Justified to qualify as such, but nowadays all the cool kids of the empirical tradition since Locke have basically just accepted that all we know anyway is our perceptions (indirect realism), which anyway doesn’t care much about JTB.

Nowadays the PSR is rarely actually used, and what we do instead is if the justifications that support such are generally stronger than the refutations, we can hold it to be true about reality. Sure, we can apply the trilemma to those justifications in turn and every. single. time. that we do that the answer will be (as we cannot finish an infinite series) either circular or “lol I made it tf up,” but so what?

Indeed, to put it more plainly: the world is still turning, science tells us stuff that is basically true all the time, and the doubt (if any at all) of the Author’s handsomeness is but a shadow. Why should we care? That’s a good question. First of all, I want to address why exactly this is the case, and how within a groundless reason or logic we are able to pull of these feats.

To put it simply, Karl Popper, the GOAT.

To put it less simply, Karl Popper proposed a very useful theory of knowledge~ that many might refer to as reliabilism. In such, he does not even try to talk about non-naturalistic things like proof, simply what works. This is basically what modern science (and much of the western worldview) is based on. We make theories and test them against observation by looking for places where they fail, so a theory can be “proven false” but never “proven true.” We can reliably distinguish what works in life than what doesn’t through this framework of falsifiability. Now so drunk on the practical power of this view, many folks from a scientific background try their hand at philosophy using this method for determining ultimate truth before discovering:





even its founder said “Truth? LOL didn’t ask don’t care”



that a theory utilising this method can never be verified, only not yet falsified. As a branch of this, fallibilism as a solution (the idea that yeah actually maybe it’s fallible but maybe it doesn’t matter) is also useful in that while we may not pick out the right theories, we may be able to get rid of the wrong ones. Indeed, many could argue fallibilism is the mature response to these limitations.

On the other side of the autism/schizophrenia spectrum to scientists, many philosophers embraced larger networks of supporting assumptions, which is what we might refer to as coherentism. While a simple circle might be a fallacy, so their thinking goes, a complex web of justifications is not. Indeed, stuck in a quagmire, all one has to do is pull on your arm, which in turn pulls on your hair which in turn is wrapped around your ear and you can fly! Make the circle big and complex enough, and one can do the apparently impossible with it. To be fairer to them, it is a response that makes sense; the idea of building it this way means that you can have a coherent and stable worldview even without ultimate justifications, which remains highly useful.

episode IV. Not a new Hope :(

Unfortunately, despite being able to do all of that practically, if the trilemma holds, this has some pretty bad consequences, especially for anyone claiming features of reality as real, and for moral discourse.

The best way to show this is to illustrate the difference between this and general radical skepticism.

Within philosophy, radical skepticism is a bit of a loser (if you are offended as a radical skeptic, just don’t believe I even said it thx :P). Sure, you can claim that we are in a simulation, or a brain in a vat, or the only real person, but in practice you can sybau and deal w the consequences of your narcissism NERD. It's primarily theoretical/academic, and it doesn't change how we actually live or reason. Also, even within the theoretical, it is self-refuting:





The alpha male radical skeptic



How is the trilemma different from this?

Firstly, moral imperatives, the claim that we *ought* to do things or *ought not* to do other things in most cases rests on the conception that what we are talking about is more than our personal preference (indeed, there are some positions that assert this, but practically speaking, many that work rely on this concept, that when we say “murder is wrong” it is grounded in more than “I assert murder is wrong.”) The entire notion of moral obligation, that we are genuinely bound by duties that transcend our preferences collapses into arbitrary assertion. This might not be an issue for some ethical theories, especially those which are subjective, but moral obligation is a fundamental piece for many, and many ones that one might argue are more practical. “Well, if they are practical why not just out of practicality adopt them?” Sure, maybe you can, but you can’t always deceive yourself into the sacred, when most of these belief systems require you to genuinely think that there is within reality something there other than preference.

Maybe the worst part of the trilemma though, is that of moral discourse.

We are constantly in disagreements, ostensibly about competing moral systems. We face genuine practical issues around morality: abortion rights, liberty, economic justice, animal (especially shrimp and insect) welfare, to name but a few. To most people, these aren't just policy preferences that reflect tradeoffs for different groups but reflect deep disagreements about what is right and wrong. If the trilemma holds though, then utilitarian arguments about maximizing welfare, deontological arguments about human dignity, and literally any other moral philosophy that claims what we ought to do are just competing dogmas with no higher court of appeal. Within immigration policy for example, utilitarianism might conclude we ought to let immigrants in (under whatever combination of policies), whereas deontology might think about the duty of a nation to its people. Similar disagreements happen every single day around myriad controversial issues.

Suddenly, political polarization, culture wars, and the evident impossibility of productive moral discourse across ideological divides suddenly makes perfect sense. Maybe we're not dealing with communication failures or insufficient goodwill, but with the inevitable result of groups operating from incompatible, unjustifiable, and unvocalisable (other than appealing to an infinite chain that cannot play out) starting assumptions. Of course, this is a theory many do work under the assumption of, pointing out that those assumptions aren’t just random, but a combination of group politick, genetic personality, and practical benefit to themselves. But it seems that there is a horrible cost to concluding that morality is simply a game we play on assumptions (primarily driven by self-interest or not).

I don’t want to overstate the case: of course we can still engage in moral reasoning within shared frameworks, compare the coherence and consequences of different views, and refine our positions through dialogue, and indeed there are approaches that think not only is this not problematic, but simply just the way the world is.

Now, on the possibility of self-refutation: Firstly, the trilemma is a descriptive observation about the structure of justification attempts. It's not necessarily making a strong epistemic claim requiring the same kind of justification it critiques. Like pointing out a logical structure rather than making a knowledge claim. Even more lax, it could even just be a pragmatic point a la my last paragraph. However, it could be the case that you might undermine this with radical skepticism in some form claiming oh but tu quoque, it is not justified. However, many of the issues I have highlighted (i.e. evaluating competing moral systems through some higher court of reason) actually have the burden of proof on them. If the trilemma is self-refuting, all the worse, as we can't even properly articulate why we can't justify anything!

V. wherein we attempt to wrestle, sidestep, or swallow a triceratops

There are some potentially effective methods at challenging this or consuming it, but that would make this a little too long, and even these have their problems. I will give a brief overview though of roughly where I think these might lie:

The first is to completely change the frame of logic. I.e. an appeal to theology from non-rationalism, fideism, or eastern philosophy of non-dualism (i.e. there is no knowing like this, only immediate vividness). There are issues with doing this though in terms of (i.e. evaluating competing moral theories) etc. (or in this vein of frame challenge, a revision of our concepts of justification or knowledge).

The second is to say yeah, that’s true we can’t, but that was my view anyway. Apropos subjectivism (moral claims ultimately express attitudes, emotions, or cultural constructs rather than objective facts about reality), this is basically what much of Europe has done. There are many, many, critiques of this sort of postmodern approach. Just one thing to highlight: this makes much of what you the reader would consider moral progress, irrational, and difficult to do.

The third is to say yeah, that’s true we can’t but what we have is good enough. Maybe I’m playing up the issues here. Most people will go on believing in their sacred cows, many will continue in endless debates online. Maybe there is no ought, maybe there is nothing more to the discourse of morality than higher-level abstractions ultimately grounded in dogma or themselves, but maybe it doesn’t matter. I would caution this approach as this may work now, but (if you consider systems of morality that has conceptions of the sacred practically important) it provides no resistance when that consensus shifts toward less sacred directions and more subjectivism. This also still has the open question (just pushing it one step back) well, what is pragmatically good? Certainly, there is a lot of overlap between some moral systems, but there are disagreements that often arise.

VI. Fin

In summary, I’m honestly a bit confused as to why this isn’t a bigger issue, as it seems at least some of us still think there is such a thing as objective morality. I have in part posted this in hope someone will come and beat this to death for me.

Or perhaps the great shadow of the fabulous mustache sporting German looms over us yet again:





He might say: It is all dead. & yet we must live! Violently! Passionately! We must love with the ferocity of lightning!