Münchhausen trilemma

In the situations where Münchhausen trilemma is applicable, people tend to use a version of abductive reasoning, which is finding the simplest narrative or explanation that fits the known facts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning It's important to keep the Münchhausen trilemma and abductive reasoning in mind when discussion controversial issues where one side feels they have proof and the other side is ignorant or duped. Often the difference is something like whether emergent behavior or a…

The way that Mathematics and approaches this is, using the Axiomatic way. You can view this as a game: Let's make some assumtions / axioms, and see what we can build with it. The most popular axiom set is Zermelo-Fraenkel-style Set Theory [1], but there are other choices which have been explored. Note that, there a no claims about absolute truth or reality here. We just play a game in our minds. The most fundamental question about the game, that…

So Popper was unsatisfied by this trilemma of ‘three equally unsatisfying options’, but Euclid several millennia earlier (and virtually everyone since) was perfectly satisfied with option (3).