Just the Arguments by Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone

Author:Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

And so on, ad infinitum (omitting r, t, and v for the sake of brevity).

If we demand reasons for/against every proposition, in other words, we will be stuck in an endless process of justification, unable to assert anything at all. As the philosopher of logic and mathematics Charles Parsons put it, “The buck has to stop somewhere.”

This argument does not, of course, prevent us from giving reasons for many, indeed most, propositions. And even where we cannot give reasons for a proposition, it does not follow that we are therefore unjustified in believing it. Some propositions may be self-evident – known intuitively, as “evident without proof or reasoning,” to quote Webster’s Ninth. That is how Aristotle viewed the logical law of noncontradiction and how others have treated moral rules like promise keeping. The American Declaration of Independence famously begins: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Then, too, while the buck has to stop somewhere, it need not always stop in the same place. We can assume the truth of a proposition merely conditionally, for the sake of argument. We can even assume that p is true for one argument and false for another. As the economic theorist Milton Friedman notes in his Essays in Positive Economics, “there is no inconsistency in regarding the same firm as if it were a perfect competitor for one problem, and a monopolist for another, just as there is none in regarding the same chalk mark as a Euclidean line for one problem, a Euclidean surface for a second, and a Euclidean solid for a third” (36).

It is important, though, to know what proposition(s) one is taking as given. People are often unaware of their underlying premises or think them too obvious to mention. But marriages, friendships, and political alliances can come to a bad end simply because of unarticulated disagreements about where the buck stops.

We hold some truths to be more self-evident than others, not only for the sake of argument, but without qualification. Scientists operate on the assumption that whatever laws hold for the universe today will continue to hold tomorrow. And that the buck has to stop somewhere is even more foundational than this principle of induction. Philosophers have traditionally supposed there are some necessary truths; that is, propositions that could not, in any possible world, be false. If so, the Aristotelian argument we are considering is one of these.

On the other hand, in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” the philosopher W. V. Quine put forward the idea that so-called necessary truths are merely those propositions we would be most reluctant to give up (#44). For many, the existence and benevolence of God is a belief to keep when all else fails. For Quine, though, no statement, not even a law of logic, is “immune to revision.”

The argument we are considering is important because it shows that there are limitations to what reasoning can accomplish, which goes against our cherished belief that the exercise of reason can, in principle, settle all disputes. If

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