Has Münchhausen's trilemma been solved?

Question

I believe that the classic argument that conceptual regress goes back forever may be wrong.

For instance, if I try to infinitely regress on concepts, I actually end up at a point where I can't go on much further, and I find what is irreducible or basic (or perhaps even indubitable?). I find that there is a start, or something which IS really basic or foundational.

I end up with things like the distinction between is and not, the distinction between infinite and finite, between concept and not a concept. Even the schema of infinite regress must be accepted first, as well as the inferences it draws from and leads to, and the fact that it negates its opposing viewpoint.

The infinite regress, being of no beginning or end, cannot actually be situated as anything. It is formless, and yet in doing so, we are still talking about it somehow.

Does this not prove that the infinite regress problem itself has foundational beliefs, and that the members of the infinite regress are somehow existing in what has no form at all? And, if it does not have a form, how can we even say it is formless? Surely, it cannot oppose or be like anything, even itself.

Even the most radical skeptic must see that they accept similarity and distinction as concepts. They clearly aren't saying their position is not different from a non-skeptic’s, for instance.

So they actually DO have certain things which are foundational to even their own formulation. One such primitive notion is that of NEGATION or NOT or whatever you want to call it. This is not reducible to anything else. IT has no other parts, and it just is what it is. How do we know what it means? This is a whole other question, which I fear may never be answered. Perhaps the next species after us might be able to.

I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s hinges, before anyone answers with this, and even this has some criticisms. For instance, he says hinges have certain properties in other writings, and that they are not true or false, propositions or not, conceptual or not, in others. In certain notes, he says hinges are actually necessary to even explicate the concept of hinges, and yet he NEVER addresses the simple fact that hinges are opposed to not-hinges. There is an opposing viewpoint, and one in which someone (a radical skeptic) could envision as being the correct explanation of a part of reality, as opposed to the one he propounded. He cannot escape saying something is something else, and yet he is trying to explain this in the first place.

The concept of a concept, the concept of 'itself', the concept of listing things out the way I am listing them out right now, these are all concepts. I have heard some saying that concepts are wholes with parts, and primitive concepts are unities without any parts, and which are indivisible. But even this description itself is a bunch of concepts, and even saying 'bunch', 'of', etc, are all concepts, and even saying that all of these are concepts one-by-one, like so, is itself a bigger framework, and is a concept nonetheless.

This begs the question: how do we know what 'concept' means? It doesn't seem to be divisible or indivisible, and yet, as a concept, it encompasses all of them, none of them, and some of them. Everything I have written right now, including even the question and answer framework, is a concept.

This so-called infinite regress cannot be, without members which get situated in this absolute nothingness that is supposed to be the infinite. And in the infinite regress it is odd that we should prescribe a direction to it, as well as others, about the way things should be justified, like a ladder or chain - a chain which would not exist without its individual links nonetheless, and which provides the reference for us to even know that it is before or after; that it is in fact a regress from previous belief periods.

Answer 1

The Muenchhausen Trilemma is a philosophical insight, not a philosophical problem. Hence there is no need for a solution, but the call for application.

The trilemma was formulated by Hans Albert. It states that any chain of reasoning ends in one of the following dead ends

• Infinite regress
• Circular argumentation
• Break of reasoning

The consequence of the Muenchhausen Trilemma is to abandon the search for ultimate justification in philosophy or science. Instead one can make progress by eliminating errors following Popper’s method to improve hypotheses by falsification.

For an introduction, further references and criticism see Muenchhausen trilemma.

Note. The Muenchhausen trilemma is not about a conceptual regress but covers - among others - the regress of reasoning.

Answer 2

The unspellable trilemma cannot be solved on its own terms, because it rests on an artificial definition of 'certain' knowledge which fulfils the conditions for philosophers to pontificate about how unfathomable it all is. I am certain I am wearing trousers. I am certain I am sitting in my office typing on my laptop. I am certain my house was not blown away to Oz by a twister during the night. I am certain (to take a topical example that will be recognised by at least two well-known and popular visitors to this site) the River Nile is more than an inch long. If you are prepared to accept that degree of certainty, then the trilemma is an irrelevant absurdity. Clearly we do not go through life infinitely regressing in order to find our socks (although at my age it sometimes seems like it), so one might take the view that the claimed requirement for infinite regress is patently wrong.

Personal knowledge is a adaptive configuration of the mind designed by evolution to help us survive and procreate, one we have applied to all kinds of other purposes. Whether your knowledge is certain, in the kind of absolute sense insisted upon by those who say we cannot be sure the Nile is more than an inch long, might be considered a purely academic point. That said, we used to be so certain the Sun orbited the Earth that we would put to death those who challenged the view, so clearly evolution hasn't equipped us to be infallible.

Answer 3

First, you seem overly focused on infinite regress, when one of the other prongs of the trident is 'break in reasoning' or axioms: things consisered to be self-evidently true. These began as a formalised methodology for reasoning with Euclid, and his pick of them turned out to be wrong because space is only approximately Euclidean away from large masses, making the Parallel Postulate wrong. You say 'is vs not', how about was? Which category is that in? Are mathematical truths counted in 'is', without a specific material instantiation? Infinity is considered by many philosophers not to be capable of full instantiation in our physical universe, but then that argument also applies to 'true perfect circles'. An axiom that many fans of logical inference like to champion is the Law of the Excluded Middle, but that fails to grapple with the world of our experience rather than the specific limited categories of logic. It's better thought as a choice for simplifying reasoning, than as recognising something about the world.

You say

The infinite regress, being of no beginning or end, cannot actually be situated as anything. It is formless, and yet in doing so, we are still talking about it somehow.

This is a very bad picture of infinity. The whole-number line is infinite, are we incapable of doing math? Think of the Fibonacci, we choose a starting point, begin an algorithm, and it can be taken to infinity. Pi is like that too.

You pick up on hinges. A more classic challenge to categories is thinking about what a chair is, because defining it is very contextual. Speaking of the old poker-wielder though:

"In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word ("good", for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings."

-Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations

Things like 'not' don't make sense in isolation. They are part of language games. See this answer discussing the language game 'opposites': Life and Death as one and the same?

So. Actual ways to deal with the challenge to Foundationalism in reasoning, which is what Munchausen's Trilemma presents.

You are doing Coherentism, turning one mode of reasoning on another. Hofstadter notes that when we do this we don't simply form linear relations between them, but what he calls Tangled Hierarchies, which allow Strange Loops, which he identifies as core to how minds work, and rather than circular reasoning more like a woven fabric of reasoning. First Order logic seeks to avoid such complications, but the world we actually live in requires Higher Order logics, that allow such self-referencing structures. Minds avoid Turing's Halting Problem, through their ability to 'step outside' of a current rule set. This is the basis for Godel Incompleteness too, where we find that we can recognise new truths within a system not deducible from it's axioms - because we can keep adding axioms, vstepping outside' of the system to reformulate our abstractions about it.

For further discussions see:

Does the first Godel's incompleteness theorem forbids the existence of a Theory of Everything?

Are there contemporary analytic defenders of the view that pattern/meaning is metaphysically fundamental and directly knowable?

Why is it impossible to hold both horns of a moral dilemma?

According to the major theories of concepts, where do meanings come from?

Answer 4

It has been solved. There is a beginning to the Universe. Existence, then reasoning start there. It was answered with the completion of Jewish prophecy for the Messiah, predicted by our Creator some 2000yrs ago by my estimation -- that at some point Wo/Man could complete their journey of knowledge.

To my knowledge the answer has not been published. The prophecy was pretty much abandoned by everyone in the West, both Left and the Right. We might be going a new Dark Age where the quest for knowledge was abandoned or created so much despair that no one will deserve the Answers.