Necessary First Principles, Self-Evident Truths
July 10, 2015 at 4:19 pm
(This post was last modified: July 10, 2015 at 4:25 pm by Mudhammam.)
Aristotle stated in his Posterior Analytics that "not all knowledge is demonstrative: on the contrary, knowledge of the immediate premisses is independent of demonstration. (The necessity of this is obvious; for since we must know the prior premisses from which the demonstration is drawn, and since the regress must in immediate truths, those truths must be indemonstrable)." Do you agree or disagree?
In my view, we should be cautious of treating what appear to be necessary first principles or indemonstrable “facts” as metaphysical truths about the universe. The world, as it exists in actuality or in appearance, is indifferent to how brains evolved to conceptualize their surroundings, though we would certainly like to think that our reason is divine, and hence, absolute. After all, it took over two thousand years for one John von Neumann to discover that the laws of distribution in classical logic are not valid on quantum theory. All of this is to say that while first principles may be a necessary starting ground for fertile thought, they prove nothing about the world beyond how our minds relate to it. And again, we should only accept propositions as self-evidently true --- that is, we should only grant them --- when the alternative literally makes no sense, i.e. cannot be spoken of meaningfully (as in the case of something like the law of noncontradiction). Thus we can, justifiably, take axioms or first principles as self-evident, but not merely on the basis of how things appear or feel, and even then we should admit that until we have some means of confirmatory evidence for their truth at large (which we may never attain), they could be entirely wrongheaded.
What have you? Do you believe that there are times when it is more or less appropriate to accede to self-evident knowledge? What about the lazy appeal that philosophers like Alvin Plantinga make in attempting to rationalize the existence of God as a "properly basic belief," like knowledge of mathematical axioms or valid inferences? Where should the line be drawn with regards to "self-evident" truths?
In my view, we should be cautious of treating what appear to be necessary first principles or indemonstrable “facts” as metaphysical truths about the universe. The world, as it exists in actuality or in appearance, is indifferent to how brains evolved to conceptualize their surroundings, though we would certainly like to think that our reason is divine, and hence, absolute. After all, it took over two thousand years for one John von Neumann to discover that the laws of distribution in classical logic are not valid on quantum theory. All of this is to say that while first principles may be a necessary starting ground for fertile thought, they prove nothing about the world beyond how our minds relate to it. And again, we should only accept propositions as self-evidently true --- that is, we should only grant them --- when the alternative literally makes no sense, i.e. cannot be spoken of meaningfully (as in the case of something like the law of noncontradiction). Thus we can, justifiably, take axioms or first principles as self-evident, but not merely on the basis of how things appear or feel, and even then we should admit that until we have some means of confirmatory evidence for their truth at large (which we may never attain), they could be entirely wrongheaded.
What have you? Do you believe that there are times when it is more or less appropriate to accede to self-evident knowledge? What about the lazy appeal that philosophers like Alvin Plantinga make in attempting to rationalize the existence of God as a "properly basic belief," like knowledge of mathematical axioms or valid inferences? Where should the line be drawn with regards to "self-evident" truths?
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
