Justification for Foundational Belief

[Angrboda]

I'm going to do my patented "rock skipping off a lake" impression and jump in and back out of the discussion. (I just got home after an all day American Atheists conference and don't know when I'll return again.)

First, I'll briefly remark on the question of whether reason or emotion is foundational. First note that, regardless of their biological nature, we attend to the biological needs of sleep, nutrition and sex because of emotional cues. We don't eat because we calculate how long it has been since we ate, we eat because we experience the emotion known as hunger; sleep because we feel tired; reproduce because of very powerful emotional imperatives. If you think we logically reason toward biological needs, I suggest the next time you are hungry or sleepy, you see how successful you are at logically reasoning yourself out of feeling hungry or sleepy. Dostoevsky said, "If everything on Earth were rational, nothing would happen." And while I don't depend on artists for my science, the psychological research seems to be trending that way. It's a well known result from studies of people with trauma to the areas of their brain responsible for emotion that they can be crippled by the simplest of decisions. Shopping for groceries becomes a herculean task for such people. If reason were primary, I think the reverse should be expected. (And neurologist V.S. Ramachandran postulates that the loss of connectivity to certain emotional responses in facial recognition results in Capgras delusion, where people recognize their family and friends, but are persuaded that they are imposters.) It's not conclusive at this stage, but there is plenty of evidence that emotion is at least as foundational as reason. (For an interesting exploration of this subject, see Dr. Robert Burton's book, On Being Certain, which, admittedly short on empirical backing, presents the compelling thesis that reason itself is based on an emotional response or responses.)


Anyway, generating yet another wall of text. The following two pieces are not refutations, but I think they should give any foundationalist program pause. They're rough and unfinished, but for what it's worth. (If someone wants to polish them for me, I'd be delighted, har har.)

First.

If foundationalism is true, then the proposition, 'there are foundational truths' has a determinate truth value. I will call this proposition P, and note it extends to "basic concepts" or whatever your chosen mots du jour happens to be.

A. If P is false, foundationalism is false.

B. If P is true, P itself is either a foundational belief, or it is derived from foundational beliefs.
B.i. If P is derived from foundational beliefs, then the truth that foundational beliefs need for their justification is derived from them, and thus circular and without logical force. (I believe circularity also implies a derivable contradiction, but my logic skills aren't that strong.)
B.ii. If P is true and P is not derived from foundational truths, then P itself must be a foundational truth.
B.ii. If P is itself a foundational truth, does it meet any of the typical criteria of foundational truths?
1. Is it self-evidently true. (I'd say no)
2. etc...
n. I suspect that P doesn't have any of the hallmarks of a basic concept or foundational belief,
therefore, either foundationalism is false, or vacuous.

(Like I said, it's still rather rough, and isn't a valid refutation.)


Second.

This is why I brought up Munchhausen's Trilemma earlier. Basically, according to the trilemma, in defining words, we have three possibilities:

A. Words are defined in terms of words, and so on into infinite regress; this is unsatisfactory.
B. Words are ultimately defined in terms of themselves in circular chains of definition; this produces vacuous definitions and is also unsatisfactory.
C. Words are ultimately defined in terms of basic concepts, which, by virtue of their property as needing no further definition, terminates the chain satisfactorily.


The problem with this is that it is not self-evident what is or is not a basic belief. If we wish to instantiate the third leg of the trilemma, we need some way to identify which are basic beliefs and which aren't basic beliefs, as it's not immediately apparent by inspection what are basic beliefs. In other words, we need to be able to partition the set of all beliefs into Basic Beliefs, and Non-Basic Beliefs. This requires a definition of what a Basic Belief is, or the properties it must satisfy. But this dumps us back into the trilemma for another crank of the grinder. So we look at 'A', but discard it as not satisfactory. We examine 'B' and do likewise. So we're left with option 'C', defining basic beliefs in terms of basic beliefs. However that's not actually option 'C', but option 'B', as we're defining basic beliefs in terms of basic beliefs, which is a circular definition. So unless which beliefs belong to the set of basic beliefs is itself a basic belief -- which it isn't -- the third leg of the trilemma is logically unreachable, leaving only options 'A' and 'B'. (And I would suggest that both can be viewed as a form of Coherentism.)

Anyway. Enjoy. I'm off to frolic with Buddhists and Humanists. I might return, I might not.