Justification for Foundational Belief

[genkaus]

This is what I suspected. I had to ask if there were ways to show the truth of foundational beliefs without using the belief because I really didn't know.

My response to that is showing that since the very idea of "truth" depends on those foundational beliefs, any proposition questioning them is self-defeating. Its not so much that those beliefs are true, but that they simply cannot be false.

I understand, but this still presumes the truth of the beliefs. I think this is a fair justification, however, because these beliefs have no base justification and cannot have a base justification.

Rather than justification, I prefer calling it validation. You are not trying to find out if you are correct, but constantly trying to figure out if you could be wrong.

This sounds a lot like solipsism. You know you exist and reason that reality does too by its non-contradiction, but you can't know if anyone else shares your reality.

Solipsism is a tough cookie to beat, but the position outlined here is tougher. In solipsism, the rest of the reality is the construct of your own mind and thus can be reasonably refuted with a few mental exercises. A common argument for solipsism is given as your dreams - where you exist in a world that in not real. However, I find that that reality can be altered or manipulated and your knowledge and imagination in that corresponds to what you can know or imagine in the actual reality.

The proposition here is more like that of matrix - that another intelligence is constructing this reality, therefore, there is atleast one other that shares it. However, in such a scenario, I find that foundational beliefs or axioms are meaningless. These axioms are required for you to understand the reality you live in, but in this reality, even they are constructs of the other intelligence and thus can be altered by that it willy-nilly. Continuously questioning your beliefs in your axioms and senses would be the only way to live in that reality.