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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

No, this is not the conclusion that analytic epistemology has come to. Have a look at coherentism, foundationalism and reliabalism for example. The view you describe is skepticism and is held by a very small minority of modern philosophers.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/

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> The view you describe is skepticism and is held by a very small minority of modern philosophers.

To be honest the percentage of modern philosophers (or any other modern profession) having a view on something like this has no relation to the actual thing being true, false, or true or false at the same time or neither true nor false at the same time. We're all playing glasperlenspiel [1] trying to make sense of some of the things that surround us, that is until all of us will inevitably die.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game

Whether anyone has a view on anything like this has no bearing on the actual thing being true, false, or true or false at the same time or neither true nor false at the same time, but they're specially trained in determining which is the case, so there is very likely a relation. I'm going to defer to them until such time I ever have the skills to do otherwise. That's how the division of labot goes.

Thanks for te book recommendation. Looks amazing. Loved Siddartha.

After the postmodernist wave, analytic philosophers have attempted to rescue the notion of truth. All those attempts, including the ones you listed, change the meaning of 'truth' significantly, compared to how non-philosophers use that term.

None of the listed options is so convincing that everybody using their rationality would immediately agree with the proposed model of truth. That seems to indicate that also for these options, rationality alone is insufficient to establish truth, and a belief/irrational/social factor still would be at play.

I'm not implying that the mentioned approaches developed by analytic philosophers are useless. They do deepen our understanding how reasoning and fact establishing works. But in my opinion they are still very far away of solving the Münchhausen Trilemma.

This isn't a history that an analytic philosopher would give, its just question begging from a postmodernist bias.

So which of those approaches is the one all rational humans would agree on, so that we can base the notion of truth on it from now on?

Awesome, thanks for the links - I’ll dig into those the next chance I get.

The 3 schools against skepticism all argue against each other's points, so in a sense they strengthen the skeptical position.

Appears there is no clear consensus on exactly why skepticism is false.

Your argument is an argument of Pyrrho, 3rd century BC. It refutes itself if you think about it. What they have in common though is making or relying on strong arguments against skepticism. The question is which alternative is the best, not whether an alternative is necessary.

Can’t one turn this argument around to any other school of philosophy?

Counterargument: skepticism is kind of boring compared to the other positions. There's just not much to build on if you flatly reject the ability to build things. People who're inclined to take that route are likely to avoid modern philosophy, so of course they would be a small minority of philosophers.

Or you could take a look at the references and the corpus and see that there are strong arguments against it instead of just guessing with no data. Analytic philosophers don't tend to build things anyway. They focus more on answering specific questions. There are plenty of "continental" philosophers who still do and many in fact have no problem with this.

You're assuming "building things" will bring us closer to getting to know the world a little better (or its essence), that might be false.

> so of course they would be a small minority of philosophers

I'm not a philosopher myself but I found Heraclitus's writings (Democritus's, too) a lot more interesting than many philosophers' writings from the 20th century, in this field being more modern doesn't necessarily mean being better or knowing more.

> Counterargument: skepticism is kind of boring compared to the other positions. There's just not much to build on if you flatly reject the ability to build things.

Skepticism doesn't demand that you "reject the ability to do things." See Hume.

Hahahah it's like people just ignored all the awesome philosophy from radical skeptics.

Max Stirner, the most radical skeptic of them all, is without a doubt a more interesting philosopher than many others one is forced to read. Moreover, contrary to the claim made by the OP - he expects the reader to have read philosophy from other authors.

A radical skeptic like Stirner loves Kant and Hume. Maybe it's because Kant shows that the "thing-in-itself" is unknowable even if it exists and Hume shows us that empirical observation is basically all we have for trying to work with the world. Both show that no one in science has found anything resembling truth

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