I don’t think 1) is so safe a bet. THere is atleast the possibility of an infinite chain to be ruled out. Furthermore if this refers to actual chains of questions of “why?” there can be other kinds of termination points. You can encounter confusion and you can encounter lack of imagination (“What you can question that?”).
Wittgenstein has an argument about a table on how to consult a table and how it seems problematic that you would need inifinte tables in order to use one. Instead there is some level where you just are competent, able to perform the operations without instruction. Intuition as a word would suggest that there is some abstract thing that you just feel is “true”. But other kind of termination is where you just function that way. One can for example understand the function of a eye cell as thought (atleast on the primitive level) that happens upon photon collision. “In the mind world” there is no preceding thought. It just happens just like a cosmic ray would bug out and malfunction an inner brain piece (which would in effect onlyh be a photoreceptor for a very different wavelength off-ocurse withouyt supporting structures like lenses etc).
But loopiness doesn’t need to imply circularity. If you start with some system, make it reflect on itself until it stabilises the end result might seem circular. However it might be possible to reverse engineer the reflection and there are reflection balances that have only a finite history. With chicken and egg you find dinosaurs which is a story much longer than the lifespan of a chicken but still some finite generation number. With parents you can go back to start of sexual reproduction. With off-spring you can go back to multicellular-life. With lineage you can go back to start of cell membranes. With reproduction you can go to auto-catalysm. Progressively surprisingly longer stories but they end up being linear instead of the initial seeming circular nature. And there is a direction to the loopiness, it’s only loopy towards “the future”. Thus when you are tracking where a thought comes from or its justification (if it not constructive in the sense that the discovery process builds an entity that didn’t exist before (ie you make up the why as you answer the question instead of discovering something preexisting)) you know you are going “in the wrong direction” and the circularity could end at any step.
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 think 1) is so safe a bet. THere is atleast the possibility of an infinite chain to be ruled out. Furthermore if this refers to actual chains of questions of “why?” there can be other kinds of termination points. You can encounter confusion and you can encounter lack of imagination (“What you can question that?”).
Wittgenstein has an argument about a table on how to consult a table and how it seems problematic that you would need inifinte tables in order to use one. Instead there is some level where you just are competent, able to perform the operations without instruction. Intuition as a word would suggest that there is some abstract thing that you just feel is “true”. But other kind of termination is where you just function that way. One can for example understand the function of a eye cell as thought (atleast on the primitive level) that happens upon photon collision. “In the mind world” there is no preceding thought. It just happens just like a cosmic ray would bug out and malfunction an inner brain piece (which would in effect onlyh be a photoreceptor for a very different wavelength off-ocurse withouyt supporting structures like lenses etc).
But loopiness doesn’t need to imply circularity. If you start with some system, make it reflect on itself until it stabilises the end result might seem circular. However it might be possible to reverse engineer the reflection and there are reflection balances that have only a finite history. With chicken and egg you find dinosaurs which is a story much longer than the lifespan of a chicken but still some finite generation number. With parents you can go back to start of sexual reproduction. With off-spring you can go back to multicellular-life. With lineage you can go back to start of cell membranes. With reproduction you can go to auto-catalysm. Progressively surprisingly longer stories but they end up being linear instead of the initial seeming circular nature. And there is a direction to the loopiness, it’s only loopy towards “the future”. Thus when you are tracking where a thought comes from or its justification (if it not constructive in the sense that the discovery process builds an entity that didn’t exist before (ie you make up the why as you answer the question instead of discovering something preexisting)) you know you are going “in the wrong direction” and the circularity could end at any step.
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.