Infinite Progress
Everyone's, I'm 100% certain, familiar with the good ol' weapon in a skeptic's arsenal, The Infinite Regress which is that if a claim needs a justification then so do the claims that appear as premises in that justification and then also the premises which themselves are claims in the justifcation for the justification ad infinitum.
What about things in the opposite ("forward" instead of "backward") direction? If I prove a proposition p, p must entail a further proposition q, q then implies a different proposition r, so on and so forth, again ad infinitum. This is, in my universe, The Infinite Progress.
A penny for your pensées!
What about things in the opposite ("forward" instead of "backward") direction? If I prove a proposition p, p must entail a further proposition q, q then implies a different proposition r, so on and so forth, again ad infinitum. This is, in my universe, The Infinite Progress.
A penny for your pensées!
Comments (8)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_of_Infinity
Whether or not that is "progress" is, perhaps, debatable. Consider also John Gray's contrarian polemic The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths.
Causal component of the PSR: Everything has a cause
To my surprise there's no principle that goes everything has an effect. I drew a Venn diagram and instead of following the rule to first shade in the ALL statement (all things have causes, vide supra), I tried to draw in the X (some things have no effect - try pushing a wall, nothing happens) and intriguingly, I have to put the X on the circumference of the circle that represents cause but inside the circle that's for things which basically means there's the possibility that some things have no cause.
Is there a "last domino" in the chain of reasoning i.e. do we reach a proposition z such that it doesn't entail anything at all? Post-Agrippa's trilemma, nothing follows, not even this nor your logical reply to this ... ad infinitum.
Two problems: (1) quantum fluctuations, which are the most abundannt entities / events in nature are a-casual (re: uncertainty principle) and (2) "the PSR" must lack "a cause", otherwise it's an infinite regress / vicious circe.
(1) No comment! Assume true
(2) Ok
Ergo, analogously and contrary to skepticism, some propositions need no proof (acausal) and the infinite regress argument is flawed in the same way!
The causal arm of the PSR (everything requires a cause) mirrors its logical arm (every claim requires proof). If one is false, the other could be as well, oui?
Contradiction and infinite regress are the two things I look for to test if an argument is grounded in reality.
[quote=Ms. Marple]Most interesting.[/quote]