 I once asked my philosophy professor why on earth we were learning about Aristotle's infinite regress argument. He just looked at me and said, IN TUITION. Regardless of what country you're from, I hope that you had a happy American Independence Day, and that you have exactly as many fingers as you had on July 3rd. If you happened to pass the day reflecting on the origins of the United States, you might have happened to read the Declaration of Independence, which, after a very dramatic preamble, states, we hold these truths to be self-evident. It's a good line, one of the only additions Benjamin Franklin made to Jefferson's text, which originally asserted, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. Franklin was sensitive to the prevailing attitudes of the European Enlightenment, which had swung away from religious or spiritual justifications for ideas, and more towards things like science and reason, where supposed divine endorsement was less convincing than someone's personal verification. That's really what we're talking about here, justification, the support used to defend some assertion or belief from skepticism. The Declaration claims that its assertions of unalienable rights and the equality of all men are self-evident, that everyone should have a compelling intuition that these ideas are true, and that the assertions made by the authors are therefore justified. That's a pretty bold claim, as the obvious counterclaim seems equally valid. If you don't feel like these starting assumptions are true, then I guess those uppity colonists should really pay for all that tea they threw out. For philosophers, self-evident intuitions can be informative, but they're usually not treated as sufficient justification on their own for belief or disbelief. You probably agree with that attitude in most cases. If someone told you that you were in grave danger and when you asked how they knew they said it was just a hunch, you'd be right to be dubious. Intuitions are notoriously suspect as justification for all sorts of good reasons. They're often inconsistent between different people, or even for the same person. They can be manipulated easily by influencing someone's environment or mood. And, unlike other means of justification, like evidence or perception, there's no way to objectively verify someone's gut. It's not hard to see why many philosophers don't hold intuition in the same sort of esteem as other modes of justifying ideas. In fact, one of the most common criticisms of the practice of philosophy is that it frequently questions attitudes and assumptions that most people find blazingly obvious, or self-evident, and that philosophers sometimes have a tendency to reject those assumptions. There are consians who firmly believe that you should not lie to a murderer about where his victim is hiding. There are Platonists who actually believe that eternal, causally inert, abstract objects exist outside time and space. If you learn the reasons why they believe such things, that might sound a little less crazy, but even the most ardent defenders of these positions will admit that they're not really aligned with how most humans think. Strangely enough, despite the caution with which philosophers tend to approach claims supported solely by intuition, one of the founding figures of philosophy claimed that it wasn't ever really possible to escape its role in reasoning. Aristotle, in his Massive Treatise Metaphysics, wrote, it is impossible that there should be a demonstration of absolutely everything. For then, there would be an infinite regress, so there would still be no demonstration. Let's unpack that. For anything you might want to explain, any proposition you might want to put forward, you must appeal to something else to explain or justify it, maybe some bit of evidence, maybe some logical principle. That's fine, but now you have a new proposition that you must also explain somehow. That explanation will require a third thing, which requires a fourth, and so on, unto infinity. As we can never actually supply an infinite number of explanations, at some point we have to stop, leaving the entire chain of justifications dangling from a single proposition that we justify only by saying that it seems to be true. That's kind of a big deal, because an explanatory chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If someone were to say, I believe you should jump out of the car immediately, because I believe it is in danger of exploding, because I believe there's a fire that will light the gas tank, because I might have smelled something burning. The strength of the other justifications is moot compared to the weakness of the last one. This is an interesting challenge to epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge and justification. In some ways, it seems to point towards universal or academic skepticism, the flat-out denial that knowledge is even possible. Take the law of non-contradiction. No statement can be simultaneously true and false. How do we know that's accurate? Well, it seems ludicrous to suggest that it could be otherwise, right? It's one of the most fundamental and tautological ideas that we can imagine. How can it possibly be wrong? All that is to say, it seems very intuitive. And if our friend feels the same way about us being in danger, he has the same sort of justification to believe that. If all reasoning, if logic itself ultimately rests on an intuition that the law of non-contradiction is true, and intuition is insufficient justification for belief, that invalidates the entire enterprise of reasoning and knowledge to begin with. The argument is self-refuting if you give it a little thought, but it might well be cause for concern. If we can't find any justification for believing the law, we're really up the philosophical creek without a paddle. Some thinkers, including Aristotle, solve this problem by suggesting that it's possible for an idea, like the law of non-contradiction, to be so intuitive or so infallible that it no longer requires outside justification to be true. Ideas that fall into this category could then be used to justify other beliefs, to build an entire belief structure from some first principles. This position is called foundationalism. The most famous foundationalist construction is probably Descartes Cogito, the whole I think therefore I am thing. He took the existence of a thinker as one of these irrefutable foundations, asserting that his existence was inarguably justified by the subjective awareness that he was thinking, and in turn, using that underlying fact to draw conclusions about other likely aspects of the universe. However, foundationalism has some potential difficulties. Some people find it hard to believe that there exist some special class of assertions that are exempt from the normal requirements for justification. Others have pointed out a sort of recursive, Gordellian objection to the idea. If you say that some assertion has some special quality that makes it foundational, you're actually making a new and different assertion, one that doesn't have that quality and isn't exempt from justification. Now you have to prove that your foundations are foundational. Great. Another more recent approach to solving Aristotle's regress focuses more on mutual coherence rather than some hierarchy of justification. We've discussed coin's analogy of a web of belief, the idea that all of our beliefs are interlinked and interdependent, and while some more central concepts might be connected to many others, making them much more essential for the overall structure, there's nothing that you can really point to and say, this is the origin for everything else, the way a foundationalist might. A coherentist cares more about the whole system's internal consistency, how each belief works with every other belief in the web. The idea of a chain of justification still makes some sense, but rather than a straight line, coherentism allows that chain to be attached at multiple points. In many ways, that makes sense. We rarely have just one reason we believe anything. Generally speaking, using A to justify B to justify C to justify A is not okay. Critics of the coherentist approach say that allowing circular justifications like this is tantamount to the logical fallacy of begging the question, asserting that something is true because it is. Also, just because a set of beliefs is internally consistent doesn't necessarily mean that it's correct, so there's that. As with most things in philosophy, those options aren't comprehensive. They're useful umbrella terms for hundreds of distinct, interesting, and complex positions that have cropped up since Aristotle's time. The field of epistemology is one of philosophy's most dense and nuanced areas, mostly because philosophers understand the value of being able to justify the things they believe without just shrugging and saying, I don't know, it just seemed like it's true to me. But hey, maybe that's good enough for you. It was certainly good enough for the folks who wrote the Declaration of Independence, and as we all know, King George III found their justifications totally convincing, and nothing bad happened. What are your intuitions about Aristotle's infinite regress argument and the coherentist and foundationalist responses to it? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking.