Is All Reasoning Circular: A Respectful Response to David Pallmann

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Welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Eli Ayala, and today

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I have a good friend of mine on the show, Matt Yester, and I'll let him introduce himself in just a moment.

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If you guys notice on the thumbnail of this episode, Joshua Pillows is on the thumbnail.

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Unfortunately, he is unable to join us today. Something came up for him and so he will be missed.

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It would have been great to have him on as well because his knowledge base is very relevant to this particular topic, but that's okay.

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Matt Yester, I've known for quite some time. He's a super sharp guy and I've learned a lot from him. He's just gotten cooler over the years, this mustache.

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I think he looks like a presuppositional pirate. I just made that up, a presuppositional pirate.

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I appreciate you coming on and I'll introduce you more formally in just a moment.

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Just as people are coming in, I want to remind folks that at January 15th, my

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PresuppU Introduction to Biblical Apologetics five -week course on presuppositional apologetics will be starting up.

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The premium version is what we're doing, so January 15th. That means that the people who sign up, and there are folks already signed up already, they will receive the video content, the lectures of the five -week course, along with all of the

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PowerPoints, all of the outlines, and they will meet with me once a week for five weeks to go deeper into the content.

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Folks can sign up for that. We start that on January 15th.

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You can go to revealedapologetics .com, click on the PresuppU button, and you get

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RSVP premium version of the course. It's an awesome way to support Revealed Apologetics as well.

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Sorry if I sound like a commercial. I said that at the beginning of a couple of other episodes, but I need to continually remind folks as the time is drawing near.

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I'm excited. Got a few people signed up already, so looking forward to that. Without further ado, let's introduce

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Matt Yester. If Matt Yester, you can unmute yourself and maybe tell folks a little bit about yourself, and then we'll jump right into the topic of our discussion today.

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I've been a Christian for coming on about 20 years, next year, back in 2004, and became

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Reformed back in around 2010, 2011 timeframe. I got into Presuppositional Apologetics because I saw someone's profile having this complex word on there.

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I was like, go on, look into this thing. I saw that it was related to Reformed theology, and they got me studied at the

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Boston Evangelicals and stuff like that, at least those main authors there, and then some other followers, third and fourth generation

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Pantaleons later on in the second decade. Been on your show before, just laid out basic, a little bit more advanced

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Presuppositionalism, a little bit better than the base level, just go a little bit higher, and deal with more of the terminology and vocabulary and stuff like that.

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It's been a while. Yeah, that was a great episode. If folks are interested, the video's entitled

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Advanced Presupp. You can type that in on Revealed Apologetics, and that was some years ago, but I thought that was a great discussion.

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I think people would benefit greatly if they're interested in the methodology. So let's dive into our topic for today, and I want to do more of these.

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Folks have expressed to me interest in doing these responses, playing a video and interacting with the content.

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Whether I have a... Fun fact, Matt is part Nephilim. I love the comments.

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That's pretty intense. Made me lose my train of thought. I don't know where I was going with that.

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Thanks a lot, Sky Apologetics. Anyway, we're doing a response video to David Paulman.

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David Paulman is... Well, he has a YouTube channel called Faith Because of Reasons.

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He is active on Facebook and YouTube. And he is an evidentialist with respect to his apologetic.

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And of course, that's going to be connected to his epistemology, his theory of knowledge, as we'll see as we kind of unpack the details of the position, at least presented in the video that we're going to be interacting with.

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And he is... Let's just say he's not a fan of presuppositionalism.

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Okay? As an understatement, but that's okay. It is important to talk about these issues and hopefully we can properly represent his position as best we can.

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I have no intention of making this kind of an ongoing back and forth between him and I or anything like that.

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He just put out a video. It's called, Do You Know Your Reasoning Is Valid? Is All Reasoning Circular?

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It's kind of the main question that is being addressed here. And so we're just going to address that as best we can.

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And there's that. I hope it's useful for folks. But nevertheless, let's begin here.

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We're going to start. Now, his video that he put up is about 20 minutes long. And there's a five -minute section where he plays some of Saiten Bruggenkate's content from his documentary,

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How to... What is it? Oh, my goodness. What is it?

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The Fool? How to Answer the Fool. I don't know what's wrong with me. How to Answer the

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Fool. Okay? And so I'm going to zip through that because it's five minutes. But to set some context here,

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I'm going to play a small clip that he has of me in a talk that I gave when I was speaking out on apologetics in Kansas in which

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I speak of the issue of circular reasoning and the nature of ultimate authorities and things like that.

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And then it'll jump right into his content in which, Matt, I would like you to tell me to stop.

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And I will stop and we can comment. Or if I think we should stop, I'll stop and we'll comment and things like that.

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How does that sound? Sounds good. All right. Well, let's get started.

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Let me see if I have this. Let me go a little back here. We'll start here. I was able to hear it, so I figured there was something with the audio.

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What was that? I don't think they can hear the chat either. They can't hear the video? No. I was waiting for them to say something.

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Oh. Can you hear the video? No, I can't. Oh, well, that's not going to work here. Good thing

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I took copious notes. So for whatever reason... I was just waiting for you to bring up the topic and then I was just going to roll with the punches here.

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Let me see. Hold on. Let me try this. Let me get rid of it. I'm going to stop the screen share. And then this is the beauty of going live.

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There we go. That's how it is, baby. Let's see here. Window. YouTube.

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To share audio, share a tab instead. I don't know what that means.

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Let me see here. How about now? Can you hear it?

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No. No. Okay. Well, I might be sharing it wrong.

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Let's see here. Share screen. Okay. Share tab audio.

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So if I do this, let's try this. Let's turn this on. Okay. This has to work.

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This has to work. Ready? Okay. Let's see. Before you demonstrate it... Can you hear it? All right.

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So I'm going to zoom it back just a little. Okay. That's fine. It's not the end of the world. We'll make it work.

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Let's see here. Okay. Let's begin. And that's the problem. In logic, we call this circular reasoning.

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You assume the thing you're trying to prove. Surely, you can't do that.

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Surely, Eli, you're telling us this is an inappropriate way of interacting with the unbeliever. Well, if we were talking about something that is not fundamental, something that is not ultimate in our thinking, then you're correct.

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It is a logical fallacy to engage in circular reasoning. However, it is not a fallacy when you are talking about ultimate commitments.

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Our ultimate authority in our thinking and our reasoning. Someone says, you can't assume something before you demonstrate it.

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Well, let me tell you, unbeliever. Do you believe that we should use our reasoning when we're interacting about these issues?

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Well, of course. Reason and science, right? Can you prove to me the validity of your reasoning without using your reasoning?

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I'm going to stop right here just to qualify something. And David, when I shared this video, David pointed something out that I agree with him.

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I kind of misspoke here. I'm kind of speaking in a casual context. The audience is not at all scholarly or anything like that.

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I'm kind of speaking in colloquial terms. And so it's not quite accurate. I said, how do you know your reasoning is valid?

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It is correct that validity has to do with the structure of an argument and soundness has to do with the truth of premises of an argument.

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So if we're going to be very specific, yes, that's not literally true. However, if you go back to David's video where Saiten Bruggencate is asking this very question, in the informal context in which he uses it, the people seem to understand perfectly well what he's asking.

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And so, yes, if you want to be a stickler for the terms, that's fair. We want to be able to communicate clearly.

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But in general terms, most people kind of know what is being asked there, just generally speaking.

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Any thoughts on that, Matt? Yeah, yeah. When someone could use what they think are synonymous terms, they're not being really rigid philosophically as people narrowly defy stuff and utilize it.

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Certain things can be used synonymously. Normally taken in principal charities, do you know your reason is accurate?

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What standards are you employed here? If they're using laws of logic, obviously they would cough that up and then dig into the issue of logic, the nature of logic, things like that.

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So this is just certain clips of certain interrogative questions asking the unbeliever to just provide what they're utilizing.

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If it's not just reason itself, if it's the laws of logic or something like that, they could come up with it on the spot.

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But usually that would be another undergirding issue. You're employing the laws of logic with your reason -y discursiveness and things like that.

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But he's really just saying, okay, those would have to be accounted for along either a priori or a posteriori lines, which way they want to go.

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Either prior to experience or you're just good to assert these things evidentially. But I don't know how they'd be universally true on there.

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They'd always have to be just up until the time that you've experienced them. But no one's universally experienced that, so it would leave the problems there.

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But yeah, the principal charity, I think it would just be good just to think of what someone's asking, what your standard of reasoning is there.

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You're actually doing it correctly versus someone who's insane or schizophrenic or has some sort of mental problem or something like that.

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How do you know that you're reasoning about something correctly or accurately? Validly, you're actually using a logical structure in your reasoning process.

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Otherwise, you're just saying you're reasoning without logic? What is that? Right. David is in the chat here.

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He says here, Eli, they don't, implying that they don't understand what

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Psy means. The people in the video look confused. I would actually argue the confusion is not because they're confused over validity and soundness.

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I don't think any of those people probably have knowledge in those particular terms and how they're used.

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Maybe they do. I just think that they, because you see as Psy continues to ask the questions, they answer him appropriately in the sense they try to answer what he's asking.

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I don't think that's the reason why they're confused, this issue of validity over soundness. Nevertheless, we can't really know.

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I don't know the background knowledge of the people he's talking to. Nevertheless, let's continue on. Think about that.

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He'll have to assume the validity of his reasoning to demonstrate to me that his reasoning is valid.

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He has to assume the very thing I'm asking him to prove. Circular reasoning is generally understood to be fallacious.

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The reason for this is that circular arguments assume what they purport to prove. At least one premise in a circular argument depends upon the truth of the conclusion, making the argument lose any justifying force.

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For in order to accept the relevant premise, one would have to already believe the conclusion. But if one already believes the conclusion, then one has no need for the argument.

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And if one does not already believe the conclusion, then the argument will not yield any grounds for belief.

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Despite the seeming obvious... All right, real quick. So something that stuck out to me that he defines circular reasoning.

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He says it's an informal logical fallacy in which an argument includes the conclusion as a premise, and the argument begins where it ends.

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The conclusion is assumed from the start. I noticed a shift in language.

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I don't know if this was intentional. I'm not sure of the source he's using. He says that circular reasoning is generally understood to be fallacious.

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The reason for this is that circular arguments assume what they purport to prove. At least one premise in an argument depends upon the truth of the conclusion.

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He seems to be speaking first about circular reasoning, and then switches to the use of the term circular argument.

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And I'm not sure these are the same thing. In fact, there's an important distinction. I think as presuppositionalists, traditionally when we formulate the argument, when some happen to formulate the argument in a more direct approach, using a premise -to -premise conclusion, they never put the argument, at least like in a deductive form, in which the conclusion is stated in one of the premises.

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So, for example, if I were to say, if knowledge is possible, the Christian worldview is true, knowledge is possible, therefore the

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Christian worldview is true, notice that in this argument the conclusion is not stated in any of the premises.

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This argument is a perfectly valid one, as the conclusions follow from the premises.

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However, notice that the person stating this argument would have to, in order to be consistent, presuppose the truth of the conclusion, since the argument in essence is arguing that the

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Christian worldview is the necessary precondition for the possibility of knowledge. So we want to make a distinction between the presupposition of an argument and the premise of an argument.

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So I think that's an important distinction to make. Do you have any thoughts on that, Matt? Yeah, I mean, there are presuppositions prior to an argument being laid out.

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Whether or not your argument involves the presuppositions, explicitly stated or not, they do come with the baggage there, with assuming truth of the premises, to even start with, to get to the true conclusion.

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So there is worldview baggage there. It's not like we just start with logic. There's definitely philosophical baggage there.

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It's not occurring even though the very logical process we want to employ is deduction and deduction.

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We would lay out a particular argument from either facet, yeah. Yeah, I wanted to share this quote here from Scott Olyphant in his article.

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What's it called? It's entitled, Answering Objections to Presuppositionalism.

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I think he's responding specifically to Paul Copan's objections against presuppositionalism.

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He makes this distinction, too, between circular reasoning and circular argument. He says here, Vantill is not advocating fallacious reasoning, and this is with respect to circularity.

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Though much more needs to be said, a couple of points should be remembered when Vantill wants to affirm circular reasoning.

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Circular reasoning is not the same as a circular argument. A circular argument is one in which the conclusion of the argument is also assumed in one or more of the premises.

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Vantill's notion of circularity is broader and more inclusive than a strict argument form. For example, in William Alston's The Reliability of Sense Perception, Alston argues that it is impossible to establish that one has knowledge in a certain area without at the same time presupposing some knowledge in that area.

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His example is an argument for the reliability of sense perception. Any argument for such reliability presupposes that reliability, and it does so because of the epistemic situation in which human beings exist.

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Alston is right here, Scholafen says, not only so, but to go deeper, the epistemic and metaphysical situation in which human beings exist is one in which the source of and rationale for all that we are and think is, ultimately, in the

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Triune God of Scripture. Of course, he goes into other details there. But there is the point being made that there is a difference between circular argument and circular reasoning.

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And so I think that's an important distinction that I noticed a shift in the language there that I thought was worth mentioning.

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Let's continue on. Of what I have just said, it nevertheless remains startlingly popular to claim that circular reasoning is, in some cases, acceptable and, even worse, ultimately unavoidable.

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Do you think, Matt, that it should be shocking for him to think that some people think circularity is unavoidable?

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I mean, this isn't like a weird idiosyncratic pre -supper thing, right?

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Right, right. Yeah, what do you think of that? No, we're not the first to assert that. There's been other philosophers or at least, you know, trilemmas laid out, stuff like that.

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So, if we're talking about ultimate authorities, you know, that is really the context here. What you're talking about is your ultimate authority or your ultimate context.

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Not a truncated, narrow, telescoped sliver of it, because it's, if you understand the transcendental argument, it's a worldview apologetic, not just one piece of argument here or argument stacked up that you get to the whole.

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It's argued for the entire system. And what's overarching governing authority, ultimate authority, is your ultimate standard.

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You know, by what standard? Is the question to be asked here. What is the, one who's asserting a particular epistemology if it's not revelatory, then what epistemology are they asserting?

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What are the standards asserted within that? And that is the overarching view, but also that's just epistemically, you're also dealing with the other areas of philosophy.

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Can't avoid metaphysics, can't avoid ethics. They overlap, they intersect, they're symbiotically linked, even though you can distinguish between all three there in the broad branches of philosophy.

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When it comes to worldview, that's assuming there's going to be unity and diversity there to cash out how these things are related.

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I mean, you've got to pay the bills. The worldview has to pay the bills of those things first. They can't just be taken for free and then say, oh, now we just linked down to evidence.

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It's intelligent, we've got to cash out the preconditions of it. Yeah. Now, what I think is interesting, though, you seem to be like, well, this is weird that one would think that circularity is unavoidable.

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I was thinking of the Munchausen trilemma, for example. I mean, whether one agrees it's a legitimate trilemma or not,

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I mean, the idea that this is brought up is a thing. Preceptors aren't kind of these weird people bringing up this issue of the necessity of a foundation and things like that.

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So, if you consider the trilemma, the trilemma basically is intended to try and demonstrate basically the impossibility of proving some truth, even in logic and mathematics, without appealing to accepted assumptions.

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And so, the trilemma posits kind of these three choices that a person has. You could engage in circularity, in which each proof requires further proof.

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And you go in, you know, ad infinitum. You have the infinite regress issue, in which each proof requires further proof.

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So, how do you know this? Well, here's a proof. Well, how do you prove that proof? And so on and so forth. And then you have the dogmatic argument, which rests on accepted presuppositions, which are just asserted, right?

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You kind of start with these authoritative axioms, if we can use that language. So, whether one agrees with that being a legitimate trilemma or not, this is a thing that people talk about.

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It's not something that we are just making up, and it's these weird things that he's startled that presuppers bring it up.

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I just thought that was odd. Even also, this idea that you can't avoid this foundation. I mean,

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I was reading here that Karl Popper, the late philosophical,

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I mean, he was a philosopher of science. He accepted the trilemma as being an issue. And so, whether he's right or wrong, it's not that we're simply bringing this up and no one has ever pointed this out, and no one of any note, right?

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Now, David might think he has an answer to these issues, and that's fine, but to make it look like presuppers are weird for bringing this up, and we haven't really confronted this in the literature,

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I just thought that was odd. The trilemma itself is even taking a lot of stuff for granted.

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Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. That's why I said regardless if one thinks it's legitimate or not, but nevertheless, let's continue.

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This claim is common among those Christian apologists known as presuppositionalists.

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For example, John Frame claims there is no alternative to circularity.

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No system can avoid circularity because all systems, as we have seen, non -Christian as well as Christian, are based on presuppositions that control their epistemologies or evidence.

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The critic of circular reasoning will inevitably be just as guilty of circular reasoning.

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Yeah, I'd like to read a Bonson quote there, so if someone doesn't understand Frame's quote there, Bonson, I think, says it well, and this is a quote taken from Robert Raymond's book,

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The Justification of Knowledge, and he's quoting Bonson. I don't remember the source he's quoting from, but Dr.

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Bonson says, All argumentation about ultimate issues eventually comes to rest at the level of the disputant's presuppositions.

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Pardon. If a man has come to the conclusion and is committed to the truth of a certain view, P, when he is challenged as to P, he will offer supporting argumentation for it,

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Q and R. But of course, as his opponent will be quick to point out, this simply shifts the argument to Q and R.

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Why accept them? The proponent of P is now called upon to offer S, T, U, and V as arguments for Q and R.

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But all argument chains must come to an end somewhere. One's conclusions could never be demonstrated if they were dependent upon an infinite regress of argumentative justifications.

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For under those circumstances, the demonstration could never be completed, and an incomplete demonstration demonstrates nothing at all.

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He continues, Eventually, all argumentation terminates in some logically primitive starting point in a view or premise held as unquestionable.

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And then he talks about apologetics tracing back to such ultimate starting points or presuppositions. He says, In the nature of the case, these presuppositions are held to be self - evidencing.

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They are the ultimate authority in one's viewpoint, an authority for which no greater authorization continues on here.

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So, that's kind of another, just to expand on Frame's thoughts there. Do you have any thoughts or comments on Dr.

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Bonson there? You say your reasoning process, the actions and stuff like that, we'll get to dissociation action and propositions and stuff like that, are going to be governed by that controlling ultimate authority, whether it's

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God or man, or some abstract principle, stuff like that. Something's got to be placed in that location of ultimacy.

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So, if something's right, God, what is it? They cash out and account for the things we experience that are intelligible.

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All the things in creation, they can account for the world, us, intelligibility, rationality, sense perception, all kinds of things like that.

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We could ask that question too, Matt. What is David's ultimate?

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Does David have an ultimate? And if not, what are the implications?

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If so, what is the ultimate? I think that's a fair question. What is the nature of that ultimate?

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Alright, let's continue on. It is not my purpose here to critique circular reasoning in general, or to offer a non -circular alternative, although I have done this elsewhere.

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See my series on epistemology for a more developed theory of knowledge which avoids circular reasoning.

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My purpose in this video is to critique one popular argument commonly employed by presuppositionalists, which purports to show that circular reasoning is unavoidable.

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The argument is typically phrased something like this. You must use reason in order to prove reason, or sometimes it is implied in a question along the lines of how do you know that your reasoning is valid?

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Any thoughts on how he formulates what he thinks we're saying? Do you want to add more precision?

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Any thoughts? Any comments there? It's very narrow in scope.

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I've understood it as a broader apologetic. Why would I ask that? We're talking about your epistemic lines for accounting for knowledge as well.

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I mean, probably the authentic foundation for how you ground an epistemology. If you say an epistemology exists, then you're thrown into metaphysics anyway, because you've got to deal with the nature of what an epistemology is.

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So, if you're just saying, someone's just thinking along epistemic lines and just trying to make a transcendental argument for reason, you're going to undergird that with logic or some abstract principles, such as that, and that's usually where it bottoms out there.

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Epistemically, you're being a logical foundationalist or perceptual foundationalist.

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With logic, you don't have any concrete content there. Everything would just be purely abstract and no concrete data.

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And then, I don't know how you justify the empirical observation as infallible or anything like that, given the capability of sense perception.

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They're nonetheless accordable, but they're not infallible. So, I don't see that holding a very strong weight there.

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You have something to try to blend it to, but that's the very thing you were bringing up, too. When you brought up part of your speech there, you were bringing up science.

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I think you meant along the lines of empirical sense perception, of course, and or logic, reasoning, when you were distinguishing between those two.

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You said science and reason. So, just different terms there, but that's what

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Sai was saying, too. How do you know that your senses and reasoning are valid? Your senses presuppose causal connections, relationships that are functioning properly.

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What is a proper function? And same with the cognitive process, which

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I didn't really see any concrete data used, other than just the terms thrown out there.

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There's this primitive cognitive process that encounters the evidence, and then it can interpret, sort things and evaluate the quality of that evidence there, employing a reasoning process there.

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We want to know whether that's accurate or not, correct. Where are the standards for these types of things that are thrown out there?

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So, when you say earlier that your reasoning is valid, another obvious way of saying it, your reasoning is correct, you're reasoning correctly about these things in a valid structural way.

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I think people want to say they're employing logic there. They're not maybe thinking it's syllogistic for it, but they're employing one thought to another thought.

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They believe there's coherence, there's relationality, but those things have to be philosophically cashed out, too.

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They're really just taken for granted. It ties in saying well, or as I said, what is your ultimate standard?

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Or how do you actually cash out these things if you're just saying you just take this for granted, and you're just using the stuff you take for granted to pay the debt or account for what you're taking for granted?

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Just a bunch of freebies that aren't really philosophically being cashed out, even at a latent level, though, just to get them thinking about these things.

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You get them to be epistemically self -conscious of the things they've been taking for granted. So, those are my quick thoughts on that.

30:16

Yep, thank you for that. Let's continue. The thrust of the argument seems to be that since one cannot prove reason apart from the use of reason, circularity is simply inescapable.

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Although I don't encounter this argument much in scholarly literature, at least not in this form, it is rather popular among internet presuppositionalists.

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And while I generally prefer to discuss scholarly issues on this channel, the pervasiveness of this argument, coupled with the fact that I am not aware of any direct interaction with it, moves me to make this video in reply.

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In this video, I intend to briefly explain my motivation for addressing this argument. After that,

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I will try to disambiguate the argument and clarify both what it means and how one might respond.

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After disambiguating the argument, I shall argue that it either assumes a theory of epistemic justification which can be rejected, or else it fails to recognize an important distinction between two different types of usage.

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Under either interpretation, I shall argue that circular reasoning can be avoided. Before engaging the argument directly, it will be helpful to provide some motivation for examining it at all.

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After all, why should the argument concern us? Is it really a problem if all justification is circular in the end?

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Or perhaps we should not even try to justify the reliability of reasoning? Perhaps it is simply a fundamental assumption of all philosophical inquiry which needs no justification.

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It would be an understatement to say that many philosophers are content to say that belief in the reliability of reason can only be justified in a circular way.

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Still others take the essential reliability of reason to be a fundamental axiom which is incapable of justification, and which needs none.

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But I have never found such answers to be satisfactory. I have never been content to suppose that I should require justification for my beliefs down to the bottom level, but then give the foundational beliefs a free pass.

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Yeah, just a couple of things. So, I agree with him that we shouldn't give our foundational beliefs a free pass.

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That's not the presuppositional position at all. I mean, it's been caricatured by many that that's the presuppositional position, but it's not.

32:36

So we don't believe in giving our foundational beliefs a free pass. I agree with David that to do so, if we do give our foundational beliefs a free pass, that's going to be arbitrary and in some cases going to be inconsistent.

32:47

But I think as presuppositionalists, committed to transcendental reasoning and argumentation,

32:53

I would say that we would want to justify our foundational beliefs transcendentally. The transcendental argument, and I think

32:59

Matt, you'd agree, is an attempt to justify our foundational belief or our ultimate presupposition.

33:05

This is neither arbitrary, it's not inconsistent, nor is it logically fallacious. In fact, given the nature of the kind of God we are dealing with that's presented in Scripture, I think the transcendental approach is demanded.

33:17

The triune God of Scripture is an all -or -nothing kind of deity, right? So I think that we are not wanting to simply have foundational beliefs or an ultimate presupposition and just assert it and then that's it.

33:32

What do you think about that? Can you kind of explain for us, Matt, how is it that a transcendental argument is not arbitrary, but that we actually try to provide justification from a presuppositional, transcendental perspective?

33:48

Can you share that with us? Yeah. Ours is, philosophically speaking, externalist. I mean, it's outside of ourselves.

33:55

We're not appealed to some outside process, right? Like we're talking about the ontological creator of all things, who's spoken and revealed himself in general revelation and special revelation.

34:06

And we deal with that as a worldview package, and that there's also internalist considerations given the ontological trinity.

34:12

So we're externalist in one sense, internalist in another, given our ultimate basis. We're talking about worldview justification here.

34:20

It's a worldview apologetic. It's worldview philosophy. The whole caboodle, the whole enchilada, not just a sliver of it.

34:31

So if someone's saying, you know, foundationalists have just taken after human traditions and after Christ in Colossians 2, yeah, that would be a problem on a creaturely level just say we just start with these creaturely foundations and just have a whole host of beliefs.

34:48

Well, it gets back to, you know, they'll just say, we have the beliefs that in order to justify, we need the evidence.

34:53

So the evidence is of a justifier. So it starts with a collaboration of beliefs. It assumes that the beliefs are related to each other, but that's not cashed out.

35:04

Bills aren't paid on that one. That's just another assumption there. There's coherence, there's relationality, unity among diversity that needs to be paid first and foremost.

35:14

We're saying, apart from the Triune God, who's revealed himself as the personal one of many, to grout such fundamental philosophical issues such as that, that a lot of people just take that for granted.

35:23

All these things are prepackaged with coherence, conceptual adequacy, that one fact can correlate to another fact, or the concepts relate to the object, the concepts hit the concepts, or object to objects.

35:36

Just take it for granted. The world needs to pay the actual bills on the more fundamental issues instead of leaping forward to, well, beliefs, we just have these, they're intelligible.

35:47

Wow, evidence is intelligible too, and then somehow the beliefs correlate to the evidence or vice versa.

35:53

But that unifier, that relationality, what is that? Is that just an abstract principle or something?

36:00

But what's the evidence for that? Because the thing between the beliefs and the evidence, how is that evidenced?

36:08

You know, you're just arguing for pure abstract formality there, really, and if that's your ultimate governing authority, to even distinguish between those two things, the beliefs and the evidence, there, where you really cash it out philosophically, it's just an abstract, impersonal principle, which doesn't know anything, it's not cashing out knowledge, or unity, or diversity, you have a conceptual monad without a mind.

36:31

So we're dealing in the broadest context here, not just some narrow scope here where things are just flip -flopped or reversed to try and get out of a justification issue or something like that.

36:44

That's what I saw going on at least with people bringing up these epistemological things, they'll just switch the order and say, well, we're not arguing that way, we're just going to argue this way, and then we'll reverse it here.

36:56

But I think there's underlying philosophical issues to be dissected there to see what the real meat of the issue is there, whether or not it's violated its own standard, and take a lot of stuff for granted.

37:14

You still there? I lost the audio. There we go. Yeah, I said, we're making good time, which is good.

37:23

Hopefully I wasn't too fast. You got to correct me if I go too fast. That's good, you're doing great, I appreciate it. Such a move seems completely arbitrary and even inconsistent.

37:33

If our most foundational beliefs are unjustified, then I take this to entail that all beliefs which depend on them for their justification are likewise unjustified.

37:44

I suspect that many viewers feel the same way, but this conviction forces those of us who hold it to face the original argument.

37:52

For if there is no non -circular means of justifying foundational beliefs, then we may well have to face the conclusion that none of our beliefs are justified.

38:00

For those wishing to avoid such a gloomy conclusion, there is strong motivation for addressing the original argument.

38:08

And we would say that our foundational beliefs can be justified, so we're not victim to the gloomy conclusion that we can't justify our foundation, and therefore everything else that the foundation is based upon can't be justified.

38:24

Having provided some motivation, let's turn to assess the merits of the argument. Roughly, we are concerned with the claim that one must use reason to justify reasoning.

38:34

Stated thusly, the claim is quite incoherent. Reasoning is a deliberative cognitive process.

38:41

It is not a proposition. It is not the sort of thing which can be true or false. As such, reasoning itself needs no justification since it is an action rather than a belief.

38:52

Imagine how absurd it would be to demand justification for walking, or for driving, or for swimming.

38:58

Such activities need no justification precisely because they are activities All right,

39:04

I want to get into this here. I do see David typed here something. I said that we're not stuck.

39:12

I think I've got this right. I said we're not stuck in the gloomy position of not being able to justify our foundations.

39:20

And then he says, put this up on the screen. Yes, you are. I assume we are stuck in the gloomy situation of not being able to justify.

39:28

That's the problem with circular foundation. I guess he didn't finish the word there.

39:35

I don't see how that's a problem. If the transcendental argument is a legitimate argument, we're attempting to provide a non -arbitrary justification for our position.

39:47

Have I got it wrong? I mean, I'm trying to be gracious here. What do you think, Matt? Maybe circular foundationalism, whether you want to say the evidentialist cognitive process there.

39:59

It's an activity. Just like you laid out there, it's a verb. I guess knowing, but we're just saying knowing doesn't need to be justified.

40:09

Right. Why you've asked the question, I guess. Make that parallel to driving or something like that.

40:15

If we're talking about your epistemology is supposed to be cashed out, how you know things. It's dealing with a process.

40:23

Epistemology, how do you know things? If you're saying epistemology can't be justified because it's a process.

40:30

It's a verb. How do you know things? If that's not what's meant by it, if it's going to trade on the language here of a process here and stuff like that, what's the actual concrete content being employed?

40:43

If you want to switch it and change it to propositions, you can change it to propositional content, no problem. If you're just saying just the brute cognitive processes, what is this entailed here, just matter of motion or something like that, or is it talking about employed abstract principles that would be propositional in character?

41:03

What's really undergird this whole thing here regarding well, you can't apply it to a...

41:11

Well, if you're using reason in order to justify reasoning, if there's something undergirded what you mean by reason, abstract principles of logic, things like that, then they should be ontologically cashed out as well.

41:26

If you're providing a worldview apologetic, if someone's just arguing epistemologically and they just have tunnel vision in there, they're divorced supposedly from metaphysics and ethics.

41:35

I just don't think that can actually carry through because then you just trade on abstract terms here and just switch it, but what's the actual content of this activity?

41:46

Is it just merely matter of motion, just electrical signals, synapses, whatever? We talked about bare bones, cognitive processes, has some capacity to deliberate and things like that.

42:03

He says here circular foundations are unjustified. That seems to me just to assume that transcendental arguments aren't a thing.

42:13

Because transcendental arguments are what? We're trying to justify our ultimate presupposition. We're not foundationalists, we're transcendentalists.

42:20

We're talking about that, which goes at the broadest context on some truncated sliver of epistemology that just has arbitrary creaturely notion that has other ones that just want to pay each other's debts at the argument there or multiple.

42:38

It's not usually strictly one foundation usually. It will include a cluster of ideas and stuff like that.

42:47

There's a cluster of these things, which you assume they're correlated, they're unified, they're somehow related to each other.

42:54

Then from these probably basic beliefs, certain foundationalists say that it's not just one belief, it's probably basic beliefs that are obviously related to each other or correlate or whatever that could be used as a foundation for other things in a discursive fashion.

43:12

But it's not just one thing built upon one another. There's usually a lot of things that are taken at the same level that assumes they're unlikely coherent and unified in some underlying manner.

43:25

But then there's something else undergirding that to provide for the unity of that diversity of beliefs.

43:32

I don't think anyone's very strict in that sense there. I think it's you're dealing with clusters of beliefs.

43:38

It would be your foundations. Let's continue on. Thank you for that. Rather than propositions.

43:45

Once we have understood that only propositions require justification due to their potential to be false, it becomes evident that the act of reasoning does not need justification because it is non -propositional.

43:58

Sometimes the problem is phrased as a question along the lines of, how do you know that your reasoning is valid?

44:04

But stated in this way, the argument is guilty of a category error. Validity is not.

44:10

It is a category error if you press it for like literally that's what we mean.

44:18

That's not what most people who use that phrase mean when they're saying it in kind of a colloquial informal way.

44:26

But again as I said before, he's correct that a reasoning is, validity

44:31

I'm sorry, is with respect to the structure of argumentation and so in that sense reasoning, in that sense reasoning wouldn't be valid or invalid.

44:41

However we could just simply reformulate what we're saying to be more precise and I think that's good that David pointed out the importance of speaking with more clarity.

44:51

I think admittedly that's something we all could improve on. What I appreciate about David's presentation here is that while there's a whole host of things that I disagree with and I find questionable,

45:02

I like how he has placed everything in an orderly way so that it's easy to at least follow. And so I appreciate that.

45:09

But nevertheless. Not a property of reasoning, but rather a property of arguments.

45:15

To be sure, we sometimes speak of valid and invalid reasoning, but this sort of language refers not to the cognitive processes themselves, but rather to the validity of the logical inferences that the reasoning is following.

45:29

To say that one's reasoning is literally valid makes as little sense as saying that one's driving is valid or that one's swimming is valid.

45:37

Validity simply doesn't apply to activities, it applies to arguments. But perhaps it will be objected that I have missed the point.

45:46

After all, I am taking advantage of very poorly worded versions of the argument. As I observed earlier, this argument is not as prominent among scholars as it is among presuppositionalists on the internet.

45:59

But I do think that addressing these muddled versions of the argument is an important task because it helps us to clarify what is and what is not at issue.

46:08

Now I agree. People should still address, apologists and philosophers, should still address sloppy arguments because sloppy arguments can be persuasive to some people.

46:20

So again, this is another thing I appreciate about the video. I actually agree. Helps to clarify what is and what is not at issue, that's correct.

46:28

Forces proponents of these arguments to be more precise, that's correct. I think that's something we could all improve on.

46:34

And let me see if I can read the last point. We'll let him read it actually, he's going to go through it now. Moreover, it forces those who would use these problematic formulations of the argument to be more precise.

46:45

Finally, pointing out the incoherence of these simplistic formulations of the argument can also serve to rob them of their rhetorical force.

46:53

So let me attempt to reconstruct a more sensible version of the argument. It seems to me that when someone says that we must use reason to justify reasoning, they mean that one must use their ability to reason in order to defend the proposition that reasoning is reliable.

47:11

One must in effect assume that their ability to reason is a reliable guide to truth.

47:17

Certainly this is a much more robust argument, but to answer it we must seek still greater clarification.

47:24

Before turning to answer the more robust version of the argument, we must ask what is meant by the phrase reason is reliable.

47:32

Taken quite literally, it would mean that the cognitive process of reasoning itself somehow yields justification for beliefs by virtue of being reliable.

47:43

Taken in this way, the argument is saying that one must assume that reasoning yields justification for beliefs by virtue of being reliable in order to reach the conclusion that reasoning yields justification for beliefs by virtue of being reliable.

47:59

Thus construed, the argument appears to be assuming that the reliability of reason is a necessary condition for justification.

48:07

This appears to essentially be a reliabilist epistemology. Reliabilism is a theory of epistemic justification according to which beliefs are justified if they have been produced by a reliable process.

48:20

If this is what the proponent of the argument is claiming then we may happily agree with him. It is not at all controversial that reliabilism and externalist theories of justification more generally are committed to a proving of epistemic circularity.

48:35

This is a well -known fact which is typically admitted by reliabilists and critics of reliabilism alike.

48:41

Notice, however, that if this is what the argument is trying to establish, then it assumes reliabilism and reaches the uncontroversial conclusion that reliabilism leads to circularity.

48:53

However... So basically, in English, if some people are following, they're like, what does he mean?

48:59

And that's not David's fault at all. These concepts are alien to the average person.

49:06

But when we ask for a foundation and then we point out, look, circularity can't be avoided, he's saying that that doesn't work against a position that he's going to explain his position of evidentialism and the assumptions that are built into that.

49:22

He's going to say that our questioning, or bringing up that line of reasoning, actually presupposes epistemic reliabilism, which is something he as an evidentialist rejects.

49:33

And so when we say, you know, how do you know, why should we trust our reasoning, all these sorts of things, he's going to say, well, that assumes reliabilism.

49:42

And he accepts a different position. Any thoughts on that, Matt? I'm sure he'll go into some more detail, but do you have anything to say to that?

49:50

Yeah, they're free to do that. I mean, the presuppositionalist and transcendentalist is holding to a revelational epistemology.

49:56

Anyone who doesn't hold to that automatically disagrees with us. That's why we're comparing the worldviews and the standards that are being asserted there, at least in comparison there.

50:05

So it's not where, at least when Sai's asking the people or whatever, they're putting them on the street, just see it, feel it out, like what their standards are, cough them up or whatever.

50:15

If you don't hold to reliabilism or this narrow philosophical sense that we're not necessarily reliable in that sort of sense, certainly philosophically speaking, but at least try to feel where the opponent's coming from.

50:30

So if it's not that, they're free to disagree and say, no, that question doesn't really hit me, whatever.

50:36

I go, then what standard are you using? Feel free to cough it up. I'm not going to externally critique you, bro.

50:43

We want to internally critique them, so we need them to understand what their standards are, so we can understand what they are to properly represent them, but then do an internal critique on it, but no one's assuming you have to hold to our standard, hold to the revelational epistemology, or even if we were playing the reliablist game, well, if you don't hold to reason as something as a justificatory force, what would that be, then?

51:09

What is it? If they would say, okay, it's the evidence there, then we're going to critique the evidentialists on their own terms, which is going to be profiteer, and then we can do an internal critique of that.

51:18

It just reverses the order of it. Not saying there's something undergirding your beliefs in some regress fashion, where there's going to be something underlying this, underlying this, underlying this.

51:28

It really says, no, cognitive processes, now we move forward, and then now the justification is on the consequent, not the antecedent or the consequent.

51:37

So it just showed a different reversal of logical order there, to say, no, the justification is now along a posteriori lines, and that's the only thing that can be narrowed down as justification.

51:48

Everything prior to that is merely just a tool that has no justificatory force, because I think the justification has been repositioned there.

51:59

Sure. Thank you for that. Another interesting comment here revealed, Matt Yester is a Calvinist.

52:05

You're a Calvinist? Yes, I am. I knew Matt is a Calvinist. Why discuss reasoning with him?

52:12

Well, there seems to be kind of an assumption of, if he's a Calvinist, everything's determined. So we've covered that in another video.

52:19

Yes, King James only, I am a Calvinist. So if you followed my channel, that would be evident rather quickly.

52:29

So thank you for being in the comments. I don't know if that will make you go away. If you don't like Calvinism, I'm sorry.

52:39

Sorry about that, King James only. Alright, let's see. Let's continue. Not all philosophers are reliabilists.

52:47

Reliabilism's main contender is known as evidentialism. According to evidentialism, the justification that any subject has for a belief is always relative to the evidence which that subject possesses for that belief.

53:01

As Earl Connie and Richard Feldman explain, evidentialism is the view that the epistemic justification of a belief is determined by the quality of the believer's evidence for the belief.

53:13

It serves to indicate the kind of notion of justification that we take to be characteristically epistemic, a notion that makes justification turn entirely on evidence.

53:25

Well, let's take a look at that. So he quotes here Earl, is it Cone? Earl Cone?

53:32

I'm sorry if I mispronounced the name. He says, evidentialism is the view that the epistemic justification of a belief is determined by the quality of the believer's evidence for the belief.

53:42

What does he mean by that? It seems to me that to determine the quality of evidence is going to require some presuppositions and some worldview commitments that can be challenged.

53:53

What do you think of that, Matt? It seems very subjective to me. Yeah. How do you determine the quality of the evidence?

54:02

Is there an objective scale? What was that? Is there an objective scale that's been laid out that we can see?

54:09

What do you utilize it in? Maybe someone else has a different scale? How are we really able to nail this down,

54:15

I guess? Okay. Let's continue. Evidentialism seeks justification in evidence, not in reliable processes.

54:24

Hence, the argument considered earlier will simply not work against evidentialism because it assumes a theory of justification, which the evidentialist rejects.

54:35

As such, one need only reject reliabilism in order for the argument to fail to establish that circularity is unavoidable.

54:44

Now, the critic of evidentialism and the defender of this argument might want to maintain that we cannot really escape reliability requirements by asking if evidence is reliable, but this is just to misunderstand the nature of evidence and reliability.

54:59

Reliability refers to belief sources, which produce true beliefs more often than not.

55:05

Evidence, by contrast, refers to sources of justification, not sources of belief.

55:11

A belief which comes from a fundamentally unreliable source may nevertheless be justified when it is accompanied by sufficient evidence.

55:22

Yeah, I think of that one point there is where the shift of reliability is on the evidence.

55:28

I'd say, how about this antecedent there? Before you get the evidence, how about the cognitive process? How does it avoid reliability of the cognitive process?

55:37

Which is, you know, go through deliberation or quality discernment or something like that. But why put it on the supposedly like the object which would be the evidence or the consequent, not the antecedent.

55:49

I go, we'll push it back to the antecedent. Is the antecedent reliable? Just this mere cognitive process.

55:56

Brute. Just the bruteness of this. Is it, you know, is that just taken as reliable, just unqualified as reliable or whatever?

56:06

I don't see really how to get out of that, where it was only shifted towards the evidence and said, ah, but see, the evidentialist has a pushback on it because we're not saying that's the that's the the justificatory lie there.

56:22

It's not. It's antecedent. It's all the consequent. It's dealing with the evidence there. So you can't use a circular reasoning there.

56:29

But I'm saying I don't know why the reliability couldn't push back on the antecedent to do that before you cover the evidence.

56:35

It's a mere cognitive brute process here, which has never been really enumerated in any detail, though.

56:42

It was just, you know, this reasoning tool was used there that encourages the evidence, puts these quality discernment on it, whatever those were really laid out, just as quality in general.

56:56

I kind of see problems with that, where it was applied to the one but not the other, in regard to reliable there.

57:02

Not that I would necessarily maybe that's just me thinking alternatively of the way where the applicability of reliability would be asserted there by the reliability and just say, well,

57:12

I would apply it to the latter but not the former. Now, I'm going to stop the video here because he's going to go into an issue that I can just mention here because I have it jotted down here so that we're not because he does go through some other stuff that I don't want to bore people.

57:30

I appreciate David's work in putting in the time to do all this, but just his voice tends to be a little monotone.

57:41

I'm sorry, David. I don't mean that as an insult or anything. I know you're reading a script and stuff, and that's perfectly fine, and I love how your information is orderly, but just for the sake of those listening,

57:51

I'm going to move to my notes and address, I think, an important aspect of what you present in the video.

57:57

Folks can definitely check out the actual video, and I recommend that folks, if you're interested in what

58:05

David has to say, check out his channel, Faith Because of Reasons, and check out the video entitled, How Do You Know Your Reasoning is

58:11

Valid? The video is only 19 minutes and 51 seconds long, so you can totally check that out in one sitting, but I don't want to spend too much time just playing the video.

58:20

There's a couple of minutes left, but I'm going to wrap the video part up, but I'm going to keep my screen up because a lot of people have been asking

58:27

Matt about this issue of direct acquaintance, so I think as we finish, I might just play my five -minute clip of Brant Bosserman unpacking direct acquaintance.

58:40

I might just share it up on the screen and let people listen to it. As I direct people to it, I'm not sure how many people actually go and see, and I think

58:45

Bosserman I might have flummoxed the question, but he still addresses important aspects of direct acquaintance, and that might be useful for people who are interested.

58:56

So let's remove this for now, okay? And David brings up the issue of different uses of reason, okay?

59:06

And he makes a distinction between what he calls justificatory sense. He says something is used in a justificatory sense when it is offered as a rational justification for belief, and he, as an evidentialist, seems like he rejects this particular use of it.

59:21

I'm not sure if he rejects it. It's definitely not the view that he's assuming. And then he makes a distinction between that sense of the use of reason and the sense he calls functional, the functional usage.

59:34

Something is used in a functional sense, he says, when it is employed as a tool in the process of ascertaining or offering rational justification.

59:42

And this seems to be his particular use of reasoning. And so if reasoning is used in a functional sense, then it doesn't make sense to ask how do you know your reasoning is reliable?

59:55

And so he says, hey, we don't fall into, as evidentialists, we don't fall into that issue because that assumes a use of reason that we're not assuming.

01:00:04

How would you speak to that, Matt? Well, I think the way he lays it out in a further on part of the video there, we'll lay out, the thing it starts with is this brute kind of process that here he uses in a functional sense.

01:00:20

You carry the evidence, be it justificatory for your beliefs, but then he says, well, you'd use your reasoning then from the evidence to certain conclusions, and therefore reasoning in that other sense there could be justificatory in that justificatory sense, but not in the antithesis functional sense, where it's just brute cognitive function or cognitive processes going on in order to encounter the evidence itself.

01:00:51

Remember, the evidence is supposed to be the justification for the beliefs. You have something underlying the beliefs and there's a regressive justification there as the appeal about the layers.

01:01:03

It's moving forward using that which moves forward from the brute cognitive processes to the evidence, and you go, oh, the evidence itself is the justifier for my antecedent beliefs.

01:01:16

So that's how I'm using antecedent consequence here, so you understand the relationship there to what's moving either behind or forward there in the linear fashion here.

01:01:27

It's either going backwards or forward, so I think the evidentialist wants to move forward with it and says, look, we've got these cognitive processes, there's more meteor philosophical issues

01:01:36

I think need to be addressed there, to be cashed out intelligibility to even discern evidence or qualities of evidence, things like that.

01:01:43

There's a lot of philosophical baggage here that needs to be cashed out. And then what is that unifier between the cognitive processes and the evidence itself?

01:01:54

Because if you use the reasoning of the mere functional sense there, then the evidence as being interpreted there, what's that thing that underlies and unites those two?

01:02:04

Is it some non -cognitive thing? It just wants to have this symbiotic relationship there where it covers the facts or whatever that's distinct from your cognitive process.

01:02:17

You have the ability, it's just taken for granted, it's a capability and it's a rational engagement of the evidence, not that the evidence makes it rational.

01:02:27

It's, I think they're presuming it's already rational to begin with. You have these rational cognitive processes going on that would need how would those be evidence themselves really?

01:02:41

If it's really said, you've got to start with a philosophical presupposition that's not based on evidence, you've got to have the evidence justify these things.

01:02:48

But how is that really correlated there? If there's something that's being the mediator between the mere brute cognitive processes,

01:03:00

I think it's just taken for granted that it's in fact irrational. I think that needs to be cashed out first.

01:03:07

That's why we're, you know, broader context here philosophically and theologically. So you would say that David is not being broad enough.

01:03:15

I think it's just pigeonholed. I think it's no different than in my mere opinion. I'm no expert there.

01:03:21

Just on a pure intuitionic notion here, it just sounds like it's no better than pragmatism or just a form of pragmatism that just really truncates itself into a very narrow epistemic field.

01:03:35

It's not really trying to cash out the big underlying philosophical issues there that are presupposed to even have rational discourse or discernibility of plurality of senses that they're unified and can be discerned from one another or work in a cohesive system.

01:03:51

I mean, a worldview system has got to be cashed out here. That's why we're talking about a worldview justification, a worldview account for the very things that we employ on a daily basis and need to be philosophically actually pay the bills for these underlying issues instead of leapfrogging two things further on down the line.

01:04:13

And then there's these other epistemic philosophical maneuvers that are already... Once you take a lot of stuff for granted, then everyone's like, yeah, we all take that for granted.

01:04:21

Then here's all this meandering back and forth of this narrow field here after you've already taken a lump sum of things for granted.

01:04:28

I didn't really see the big meteor of things being cashed out. Unity of diversity is being taken for granted. From your ultimate metaphysical starting point and obviously epistemic and ethical, which were grounded in the

01:04:40

Triune God, is creator of all things. So you have the metaphysical level of God, the epistemic level of God, God's ethic,

01:04:46

God's character, and you have the creator -creation distinction. So we have a sub -level there of the creature's metaphysic, epistemology, and ethic.

01:04:57

There's harmony between those two, but we're transcendentally vindicating that by saying you lay out the worldview system and then someone compares theirs.

01:05:04

If they're pressed to that location of ultimacy, if it's not the Triune God, then what is ultimately cashing these out at a metaphysical level as well?

01:05:12

Because you have to have metaphysics to ground your epistemology. It's not just... Paul was going to say, reasoning is not some mythical thing or whatever.

01:05:20

So is an epistemology. It's not some mythical thing to just get out of the ether. How you metaphysically grounded this, you actually have existence and existence of an epistemology and things like that.

01:05:32

I mean, they correlate together. You just really can't separate those categories from each other. So we never conflate epistemology and ontology.

01:05:38

We're just showing there's an intricate relationship there, and they are distinguished, but you can't have one without the other. It's Van Til's thing.

01:05:45

What's their knowledge is based upon what his view of reality is and vice versa. You have them as all there, one stroke.

01:05:54

Thank you for that. So let's summarize his position here, and this summary is taken from the latter part of his video where he summarizes his own position.

01:06:03

So I'm reading directly from his own summary. He says, summary, I have assessed the claim that all reasoning is circular because one must, in some sense, use reason to validate reason.

01:06:14

He says the argument is usually unintelligible, and of course that depends on how we're understanding the terms, and I agree with him.

01:06:20

More clarity in expressing what we mean should be the case. When it is made intelligible, it appears to assume reliabilism, and this makes the argument forceless against evidentialism because evidentialists reject reliabilism, and it ignores a critical distinction between two types of the usage of reason, and he makes a distinction between the justificatory sense and the functional sense.

01:06:42

He says, hey, we're using it in the functional sense, and so every time you ask us a question about how we justify our use of reason, so on and so forth, he's saying, hey, you're assuming the justificatory sense, and we're not.

01:06:56

And so there you go. That's a summary of his position. These are some of our thoughts on his position, and I hope that we've represented issues accurately, and I appreciate

01:07:10

David's work in putting the video together, and even though I disagree, it's all good.

01:07:15

It's good to have these conversations and discussions, and I really appreciate it, and for the most part, you're getting a little saucy in the comments, but people are behaving, and I appreciate that.

01:07:25

So real quick, I'm going to play—I want to close our show off with the five -minute clip because I keep getting this issue of direct acquaintance, and I think

01:07:35

Bram Fosterman did a good job in kind of explaining some of the details of that as it relates to the specific issues that people ask about with respect to knowledge and presuppositions and so on and so forth.

01:07:47

So I'm going to play that, but before I do that, are there any last comments or thoughts, Matt, before we close off with that clip?

01:07:55

No, I echo the same sentiments there. I appreciate David doing the video in a very clear manner with things enumerated and stuff like that.

01:08:02

It was easy to follow. What does that have to do with philosophical argument, which necessarily

01:08:08

I get pretty brain -frogged on those things because they get quite heady and complicated with a lot of—now sort of that with like, you know, you can do some things with like five different adjectives that are qualifying that now or something like that.

01:08:20

So it gets quite heady and stuff like that, but at least understand the brass tacks, what the fundamental issue was and how people were using it and certain maneuvers and stuff like that.

01:08:28

I understand people have those sort of things. It's like, well, what if you presented it this way, you know, and would it avoid this or whatever?

01:08:37

I can understand that. I was just trying to track as best as I could and offer my—because

01:08:42

I think the video came out quite a few days ago, so I had a certain number of times to go over it, make sure

01:08:48

I get down to the nuts and bolts of it so I got to try to offer my thoughts on it.

01:08:54

It takes a little thought too. I'm not a professional philosopher so some of the terms I'm familiar with.

01:09:00

I'm a bean counter by trade. What was that? I'm just a bean counter by trade.

01:09:07

You know what a bean counter is, right? You know what that young—what a bean counter is. Hat meat? No. You said meat counter?

01:09:15

Bean counter. Oh, I thought you said meat patter like you have meat packages. That was way off.

01:09:23

A little archaic term for accountants. I just like doing stuff on the side regarding apologetics and theology and philosophy and stuff like that.

01:09:31

Just as an educated layman at a very layman's level, you know, the average guy but still got some learning to do.

01:09:38

I like to deal with more complex things like that just to get the juices flowing and stuff like that.

01:09:44

I give kudos for that for laying out a clear presentation and what you thought was an issue or something like that.

01:09:51

I think this business market is a little too truncated on both accounts, both reliabilist and evidentialist to really deal with the worldview apologetic that the transcendentalists laid out by Van Til and his followers regarding where they're represented as a worldview apologetic.

01:10:12

Even though we get slivers of certain videos or something like that. How the

01:10:18

Answer Fools is a pretty long video there. So I'm really just saying, hey, this is me in the argument here.

01:10:24

That's one sliver of questions that I would be asking people on the street level and he's getting to the broader context there.

01:10:31

But he has to have some narrowing questions there to start with that broaden it out from there. The discourse there of pre -evangelism is laid out so that the unbeliever understands his governing presuppositions there.

01:10:44

He becomes more epistemic self -conscious of them and it usually happens given the interrogatives that Psy was given there.

01:10:50

So you only got a sliver of the apologetic there. It's not the meat and potatoes of the whole kid caboodle.

01:10:57

If you understand the transcendental argument of presuppositions. Well, thank you for that and I appreciate your friendship.

01:11:03

I appreciate you coming on and I hope this has been somewhat helpful. Of course, this is not going to end all controversy, obviously.

01:11:10

There's other issues and broader issues and more technical things to consider. As you know,

01:11:17

David seems to be coming from a very analytic perspective in terms of how words are being used and whatnot.

01:11:23

So that can get very intricate very quickly and I think it's an important discussion to have to be more detailed and more specific.

01:11:29

And so David, thank you for putting out your video, giving us something interesting and useful to interact with.

01:11:36

And for those who are listening, I hope it's been useful. So we're not going to end just yet. We're going to end after playing this clip of a younger me.

01:11:46

I don't have white hair in this video. A younger me with a younger Brant Fosterman talking about the issue of direct acquaintance.

01:11:54

Not a topic directly related to the video, but it comes up so often, I figured, why not? Let's end with that.

01:11:59

As soon as that video clip ends, the episode will end and I'll do so right now.

01:12:04

I bid everyone farewell for now. Actually, I will be on Chris Arnzen's radio show on December 21st.

01:12:12

So if folks are familiar with the radio show Iron Sharpens Iron, you follow Chris Arnzen on Facebook or on the website, the radio station website.

01:12:20

I will be on his show on the 21st of December. So throwing that out there. Alright, let's play this bad boy and then we'll end things here.

01:12:30

Last question, and it's a greedy question that I want to ask. So I apologize if I skipped over anyone's questions.

01:12:38

I did want to kind of move along here. We're already at an hour and 44 minutes and Dr. Bosterman has been so generous with his time.

01:12:46

And so this is going to be the last question. Okay. So I have heard folks say that presuppositionalism doesn't work.

01:12:56

The transcendental argument doesn't work. You don't need the Christian worldview to ground knowledge because I have an argument from direct acquaintance.

01:13:07

I can be directly acquainted with certain experiences that I have. This is undeniable.

01:13:14

And so I don't need to presuppose the truth of Christian theism. These are things that I know immediately.

01:13:20

And so it doesn't, you know, either transcendental argument, presuppositionalism doesn't deliver on what it says it delivers, and I don't need it anyway.

01:13:29

So how would you respond to an argument from direct acquaintance that we can be directly acquainted with things and cannot be wrong about it?

01:13:36

So there you go. I don't need any Christian presuppositions. I don't need circularity in my arguing.

01:13:41

I know these things. I'm directly acquainted with them. Okay. So a few things.

01:13:49

You know, what people are usually speaking about there, I mean, they probably don't know Johann Fichte. I mean, no one reads him anymore.

01:13:56

Essentially, you know, feelings and states of feeling are things that are immediately known or more immediately known or things like that.

01:14:08

I would, first of all, ask them what they mean by no. A feeling is not knowledge.

01:14:15

If you give a name to that state or to that condition, and you even say that those states are alike, you know, even the way you're describing it,

01:14:23

I have immediate knowledge of states. What is the universality or the generality of those states?

01:14:32

And how are you able to predicate that thing to multiple things?

01:14:39

You don't have an immediate knowledge of that. In fact, what that means is you don't have an immediate knowledge of those states.

01:14:45

You have a mediated knowledge of those states wherein you're applying a universal descriptor to that state, even as you're reflecting on it or knowing it or recalling it, which you're not just telling me you're having an immediate state right now.

01:15:00

You're remembering a state. So, in fact, every time you're having a state, you're remembering a state of feeling slightly thereafter, at least in terms of your cognitive process.

01:15:13

So to call that unmediated is a grave mistake. It is mediated. It's mediated even in that rational, subjective realm in which you name it, speak of it, recall it, all of it.

01:15:24

And then you ask yourself, how can you be certain that you had any of those states?

01:15:32

And again, we would answer the only being who could speak with authority is that being who resides outside of you, who knows himself and knows all things by himself.

01:15:42

And that's why we'd say you have to know the God who knows everything to know anything. And these more immediate states are themselves immediately bearing witness to the

01:15:53

God who made you, the God who created you. So when someone says, I am currently having a sensation of pain, that statement is in the past.

01:16:07

I just said it. Yeah. But isn't it the case that even the statements in the past,

01:16:13

I'm still experiencing the pain immediately? No, you're experiencing it through time.

01:16:19

You're experiencing that through space. You're experiencing that through the very names and language that you can ascribe to it.

01:16:27

You're experiencing that with reference to a multitude of other things. In fact, when you speak of I'm immediately experiencing pain, that right there has a reference to what you're not experiencing, evidently pleasure.

01:16:42

There's a whole cognitive world that's married to.

01:16:48

And this is what we talk about when we talk about description and definition themselves requiring multiplicity.

01:16:56

And so you're still in a place of saying, how do you unify the one and the many?

01:17:02

I mean, Hume is ready to contemplate that he would say that there's surely no proof that your cognitive state is one unified solar being who could say that you weren't like a string of chasing

01:17:17

Christmas lights going on and off, your consciousness itself being totally discontinuous with prior states of being.

01:17:25

So even when you say, I am experiencing pain, you're already referring to a one and many, an

01:17:32

I that maintains unity through a diversity of things. And again, you would say, what can facilitate that?

01:17:41

What can facilitate this unity through diversity? And the answer is nothing in creation suffices.

01:17:48

And the answer is that again, that's why everything bears witness to the

01:17:53

God who's an absolute one in many and can and has made a created one in many to bear witness to him.

01:18:01

That was an excellent answer. All right.