Jamie
Religious conservatives have given fundamentalism a bad reputation. The underlying idea, however, has a respectable philosophical cousin called foundationalism: knowledge rests on a foundation of first principles held to be certain. Descartes is the classic example. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes searches for total certainty, and by doing so he subjects everything to doubt. He arrives at the one thing he is certain of, his own existence (Newman, 2023). Descartes’ approach has also been used to describe mathematical systems and some scientific theories. First principles are adopted as true, and everything else is logically proven or demonstrated from them. Euclidean geometry is often cited as an example.
Christian Fundamentalists, motivated by a desire for absolute certainty, have adopted a list of tenets they hold as unquestionably true. One such tenet is that the Christian Bible is inerrant. Everything written in the Bible is believed to be the word of God and therefore must be taken as true. The position runs into trouble when the logical inconsistencies within scripture are pointed out. Christian Fundamentalists must engage in a significant amount of mental gymnastics to rationalize these inconsistencies away.
Abandoning the requirement for absolute certainty allows us to escape and move beyond fundamentalism. First principles can be viewed pragmatically as useful starting points for creating a system. They can be seen as approximations rather than absolute truths. Geometry assumes space is continuous and infinitely divisible. Physical space-time may actually be digital. The results in geometry, however, still give approximately the same outcomes whether space-time is infinitely divisible or digital. This is because the resolution of our physical universe would be so high that the two models are indistinguishable to human perception. Similarly, as the resolution increases, a digital music recording becomes indistinguishable from the continuous original to human hearing, while avoiding the surface noise inherent in analog records.
Where to Begin
In selecting a set of principles to create a system, the essential characteristics are as follows:
- Each principle should be a single, simple item rather than a compound collection of ideas.
- The principles should be independent. The validity of any one principle should not affect the validity of the other principles.
- The principles should be essential, with no principle derivable from the other principles.
- The principles should be necessary, meaning that removing a principle reduces the set of provable members within the system. Together, the principles generate a system through logical reasoning.
Loops
Some systems can be constructed using different sets of first principles. The reinforcing circular logic for these systems yields a loop architecture. The loop is like the question “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” Structures with this circular, self-referential quality are explored by Douglas Hofstadter in his books Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter, 1979) and I Am a Strange Loop (Hofstadter, 2007).
References:
Hofstadter, D. R. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid. Basic Books.
Hofstadter, D. R. (2007). I Am a Strange Loop. Basic Books.
Newman, L. (2023). Descartes’ Epistemology. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/descartes-epistemology/
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