Bioenergeia

In a series of exchanges between popular debate streamers Notsoerudite, Jay Dyer and Andrew Wilson on the “Whatever Podcast”, Agrippa’s Trilemma was brought up, presenting a conversational barrier which prevented further debate progress. This has sparked reaction videos trying to rationalize the Trilemma and what it means for knowledge claims in modern debates. In the original debates on the Whatever Podcast, and subsequent reactions, there is a simultaneous overestimation and underestimation of the significance of the Trilemma. The side of the western empirical tradition (Notsoerudite) believing that the Trilemma necessitates a radical skepticism of all justification systems, and the Orthodox Christian Presuppositional apologists (Jay Dyer and Andrew Wilson) seeing it as self-refuting. A careful examination of the epistemological frameworks of both sides, and objections to Agrippa’s Trilemma are needed to properly assess its significance in modern philosophical debate.

Agrippa the Skeptic’s Trilemma states that all systems of justification fall into at least one of three structures: dogma, circularity, or infinite regression. To put it differently, if you tried to uncover the justification for a system, eventually you would reach an assertion without a justification, your reasoning would loop back on itself, or you would be stuck in a chain of reasons requiring other reasons that don’t converge and the chain regresses infinitely. Both sides of the exchange on the Whatever Podcast seemed to take a maximalist view of what the Trilemma implies, radical skepticism. The western empirical proponent believes it undermines the use of Presuppositional approaches to debate because it equalizes the status of all justification systems, whereas the Christian apologist in this case dismisses the thought believing it makes knowledge of any kind impossible to justify and is therefore self-refuting. The mistaken assumption here is that Agrippa’s Trilemma doesn’t require the radical skeptic’s conclusion. It is only the observation that systems of justification behave in the way described, not that all debate at the foundational level is useless. There are alternative ways to interpret the Trilemma such as implicitly accepting one of the horns but with a different framework.

Both Immanuel Kant and W.V.O. Quine could be interpreted as accepting one of the horns of the Trilemma. Kant proposed that there are truly basic structures called “categories of the understanding” (Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality) which are not justified in the same way as mundane ones. Kant argued that they are what shape our experience of the external world, making them justified by transcendental necessity. Quine’s Coherentism is a more radical alternative. Quine rejected the need for indubitable starting points or self-evident truths in a Cartesian sense and embraces a holistic circularity. This is distinguished from a question-begging logical error by its being a large scale, mutually supporting web of beliefs. This means the system is ultimately circular, but it is broad and revisable as opposed to rigid and self-referencing. Quine’s reframing of questions of Descartes’ Foundationalist epistemology highlights the tension occurring between Notsoerudite and Jay Dyer.

Dyer, being a Presuppositional apologist in the vein of Greg Bahnsen, believes in a Coherence theory of justification and explicitly rejects Foundationalism unlike Notsoerudite, who falls somewhere within the Cartesian umbrella. This point of contention is explicitly brought up in their debate on feminism when Notsoerudite gives examples of values which feminism helps achieve and Dyer tries to move the conversation to the metaethical by questioning how she knows which values are good/true. It is then that Notsoerudite invokes Agrippa’s Trilemma as a way of saying that discussing justification of entire worldviews is not relevant and they are on the same shaky ground. Notsoerudite also says that in debate you are supposed to grant the opponent their normative grounding, but Jay rejects this because Presuppositional argumentation is about not granting the opponent an assumption which they haven’t justified. In subsequent debates Andrew Wilson also argued the Trilemma was self-refuting, but this is better reconciled by acknowledging the difference in how the debaters conceptualize knowledge.

The Presuppositional Orthodox Christian apologists in these debates do not see knowledge as a linear series of justifications built on some indubitable truth like the Cogito, they view knowledge as a web of theory laden and self-reinforcing beliefs. What follows is that the problem of Agrippa’s Trilemma can be acknowledged but the debate then transforms into a debate about epistemological frameworks. In the debate between Notsoerudite and Jay Dyer, the fundamental question was not about the history of feminism, divine command theory, value judgements or even Agrippa’s Trilemma; it was about Coherentism and Foundationalism, which it asymptotically approached but never reached.