I don’t have a rigorous argument against an infinite chain, but here’s my current set of intuitions: Let’s suppose that we have an infinite chain of reasons. Where does the chain come from? Does it pop out of nowhere? Or is there some intuition or finite collection of intuitions that we can posit as an explanation for the chain? While technically possible that the infinite chain could require infinite different intuitions to justify, this seem rather unlikely to me. What then if we accept that there is an intuition or there are intuitions behind the chain? Well, now we ask why these intuitions are reliable. And if we hit an infinite chain again, we can try the same trick and so on until we actually find a cycle
Sure you can carry on trying but you are not guaranteed to succeed. You could go increasingly meta without finding a loop.
If meta-justifications are just not adhoc you could employ them against loops. If I was unsatisafied with a level of justification being circular I could insist that there must be a further level of intuitions that warrant the situation which themselfs don’t have the loopy nature.
I don’t really think that infinite chains are a good approach but I am not convinced that the investigation is cast in solid enough of logic that it makes explicit the reasons to take its finding seriously. A method of exhaustion with open vents is comparatively weak.
I don’t have a rigorous argument against an infinite chain, but here’s my current set of intuitions: Let’s suppose that we have an infinite chain of reasons. Where does the chain come from? Does it pop out of nowhere? Or is there some intuition or finite collection of intuitions that we can posit as an explanation for the chain? While technically possible that the infinite chain could require infinite different intuitions to justify, this seem rather unlikely to me. What then if we accept that there is an intuition or there are intuitions behind the chain? Well, now we ask why these intuitions are reliable. And if we hit an infinite chain again, we can try the same trick and so on until we actually find a cycle
Sure you can carry on trying but you are not guaranteed to succeed. You could go increasingly meta without finding a loop.
If meta-justifications are just not adhoc you could employ them against loops. If I was unsatisafied with a level of justification being circular I could insist that there must be a further level of intuitions that warrant the situation which themselfs don’t have the loopy nature.
I don’t really think that infinite chains are a good approach but I am not convinced that the investigation is cast in solid enough of logic that it makes explicit the reasons to take its finding seriously. A method of exhaustion with open vents is comparatively weak.