Münchhausen trilemma

Duplicate: please delete this file. The Münchhausen trilemma note lives at Suplamental/Thinking Tools/Thought Experiments/Münchhausen trilemma.md. This copy was created in error on 2026-10-14 and its content has been merged into that note. While both files exist, [[Münchhausen trilemma]] links are ambiguous.

Linked from

Certainty

Fallibilism

Münchhausen trilemma

My Presuppositions

Presuppositions cannot be empirically proven, because any attempt to prove them would already depend on them. They are instead rationally motivated: chosen because they make experience and reasoning possible, and because they allow me to b…

Argument from Contingency

The stopping point is a choice, not a discovery. If your explanation terminates in a necessarily rational being, and mine in a necessarily ordered cosmos, both stop somewhere. But mine stops with fewer entities and no hidden intentions. Th…

Argument from Divine Simplicity

"Pure act" and "subsistent being itself" are names for the stopping point. Every explanatory chain ends somewhere (Münchhausen trilemma). The argument insists that where it ends must be simple, and then calls whatever is simple God. A simp…

Argument from the Laws of Nature

The regularity of nature is a presupposition of enquiry, not a finding that needs a cause. Any investigation, including theology, assumes that the world will behave tomorrow as it did today (My Presuppositions). I cannot explain why the wo…

Argument from the Principle of Sufficient Reason

The PSR is a working habit, not a law. "Look for a reason" is the right rule for enquiry, because reasons usually turn up. It does not follow that every fact has one. Nothing demonstrates the principle, and it cannot be demonstrated withou…

Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

We have independent checks, and so does everyone. Bridges stand, predictions come true, instruments agree with each other. Plantinga says that using one's faculties to check one's faculties is circular, and so it is, for everyone, includin…

Transcendental Argument

I do account for the laws of logic. See My Presuppositions: they are a priori constraints on coherent thought, discovered rather than invented, and compatible with naturalism as either features of evolved cognition or formal constraints on…

Foundationalism

Foundationalism is the third horn of the Münchhausen trilemma: the chain of justification stops at something accepted without further justification. The trilemma's challenge is that the stopping point looks like dogmatism; the foundational…

Infinite regress

An infinite regress is a sequence in which each member depends on the one before it, with no first member. In epistemology it is the chain of justifications in which every reason requires a further reason (the first horn of the Münchhausen…

Presuppositionalism

The argument it rests on is the Transcendental Argument, which I address there. In short: it is circular by its own admission, its central premise (that only the Christian God can ground logic) is never argued for, and the demand that one…

Hans Albert

Hans Albert (1921–2023), German philosopher and the leading continental exponent of Karl Popper's critical rationalism. Treatise on Critical Reason (1968) named and formulated the Münchhausen trilemma: every attempt at ultimate justificati…

Owens Tryptic of Ignorance

Münchhausen trilemma