Couple of days ago I saw a post about on atheist community about a quote saying atheist can't base their morals on anything.
I commented that if religion didn't accept some premises like god, they wouldn't either. Some said I am wrong and downvoted me. So I decided to post here about to what extent can I be skeptical about premises, to see where I am mistaken (or commenters).
Before that post, for a while I had an idea that even the analytical truth/necessary truth (whatever you name it) like "a is equal to a" are premises which can not be proven (since they are the basics of our logic, which will we be in use to prove claims) even though they seem us to be true by intuition. They just have to be accepted to be able to further think about other things.
So my question is since we can question the correctness of basics of our logic and cant find an answer, we can not justify or learn anything. Also, there lays the problem of do we really understand the same thing from the same concepts, and does language limit us?
If I am mistaken, which is highly probable, please correct me and don't judge. I am not much of a philosophy reader.
I would really appreciate it if you could share some resources (video, article, book, anything...) about limits of our understanding, logic, language and related topics.
Thanks in advance...
You raise a very good point. I think there are several ways this can be caused, some of which you already mentioned yourself:
Our definition of knowledge is itself subject to the trilemma. Every statement we make about not-knowing is just as much in need of a dogmatic assumption, an infinite regress or a circular reasoning as statements about knowing. If we take apart the statement “We do not know anything”, we will find that multiple of its parts are based on the assumption, that something exists, which itself is a textbook example for the trilemma. Thus we can not know that we do not know anything, while at the same time knowing, that we can not know anything.
The subject matter of paradoxes is imaginary. Does the sentence "This sentence is a lie" really exists, if it is entirely located in a latent space of common understanding? What makes it be a thing that can be referred to? Our reference can only be made into this latent space of linguistics and common understanding, but this applies to every piece of knowledge.
Logic theory doesn't hold up when faced with self-reference, which would be better dealt with using unconventional logic systems like Paraconsistent Logic.
There are probably more...
Difficult. There are many different concepts of cognitive closure and some may be more to your liking than others. I personally like Kant's approach in Critique of Pure Reason. He introduced "categories", which are mental frameworks that shape our understanding of reality, and argued that certain aspects of reality may be inaccessible to us, because we lack the categorical framework for those.
On linguistic relativity, I highly recommend Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass: why the world looks different in other languages. It's an overview of the entire research within this field, which challenges every linguistic theory regarding how language shapes our understanding of the world and thus debunks "common" linguistic myths.
You are welcome!
You really do understand me. I mean I couldn't find anyone out there, in flesh to speak about these but here I am discussing it with a complete stranger on internet. I really appreciate your effort, thanks again.