Trilemma

Via Vox Populi, Alexander Macris writes on Agrippa's Trilemma. Any sane man hoping to prove any proposition must choose:

• Circularity.
• Progress ad infinitum.
• Assumption.

(This isn't CS Lewis' liar / lunatic / Lord well-poison. Josh MacDowell (la) stole "trilemma" for that. Because the MacDowells are liars like Lewis was.)

To all that Nietszche found a fourth option: to deny cause and effect. The Bagestan has identified this as the null hypothesis toward The Warp. We don't let you off that easy here.

Interrogating the list itself, we all agree to laugh at the Turtles All The Way Down route and to exclude it from logic. We use progress instead forward, with induction and/or the infinitesimal, starting with the Assumption. For probing back in time, we adjust the question, if we can, and if we can't as with Goedel then hey - that can form a new Assumption. We're left with the dylemma.

Macris applies the truncated Trilemma to the Wars Of Religion. Circularity is made truthy by collecting assumptions, examined or otherwise. The circle invites and binds a community: everyone is invested in their fellow man, and the circle of assumptions isn't much questioned. How exactly does the Triune Nature of the Godhead put food on the table?

Different assumptions challenge the circle. Usually those foreign assumptions are just wrong, and break against the walls. Sometimes the new axiom is not so obviously wrong. Even here it might not challenge the circle's assumptions enough to matter, so is simply accepted, or at least permitted. But those other times...

Sometimes Agrippa is devolved into Plato (Assumptions, mathematics) and Aristotle (Circularity, observation of nature). This is simplistic on account Plato was indebted to natural-history in the form of astronomy, and Aristotle to mathematics in doing any sort of logic at all. But up to the Middle Ages philosophers did tend to choose one side or th'other. Since the Middle Ages, the scientific method which works for us is to accept mathematics as the language of possible nature, and to find the simplest and best equations to describe what we observe.

Our modern world, to which even our Pope now subscribes, has chosen false equations and deliberately excluded relevant data. To the extent the term "heresy" is objective, the Pope is damning himself and those he leads.

WITHOUT COMMENT 10/29: DSC goes into postMediaeval scientody, heavily reliant on probability and, I'd add, Bayes. Not really in scope for this post; I am a mathematician and sometime historian, not a scientist. My side took the W when William of Ockham crossed Ludwig's border.