Sorry, Albert. Agrippa's Trilemma is busted. Another W for Bucknell:>The Trilemma proves that inferential chains must regress, loop, or terminate. It concludes that all justification must regress, loop, or terminate. The move from the first proposition to the second requires the unstated premise that all justification is inferential chain-extension. That premise is the load-bearing wall of the entire argument, and the amphiboly in the third horn is where it hides. If justification can take forms other than sequential chain-extension, if a claim can be warranted by independent constraints that do not form a chain, then the Trilemma’s trichotomy does not apply to it, and the argument is a theorem about chains, not a theorem about knowledge.>Either way, the third horn’s claim to universal scope collapses. By amphiboly if the assumption is hidden; by loss of universality if the assumption is stated. The Trilemma cannot have both universal scope and a valid third horn.
>This does not mean that independently warranted termination is easy to achieve, that any particular epistemological framework achieves it, or that the Trilemma’s challenge is trivial. The first and second horns remain potent constraints. The third horn remains valid against any framework whose stopping points are genuinely unchecked. What the amphiboly shows is that the third horn is not the universal principle it has been taken to be. It is a conditional claim: if termination is unchecked, then it is epistemically defective. The Trilemma presents this conditional as a categorical. That is the error.>The consequence is that the Trilemma does not exhaust the logical possibilities for justification. There exists a class of justificatory structures, those that terminate at independently warranted stopping points, that is not addressed by any horn. Whether any existing or future epistemological framework occupies this class is a separate question. The contribution of this paper is to show that the class exists and that the Trilemma never ruled it out.>Now that the amphiboly has been identified, the question shifts: does any form of justification terminate non-arbitrarily? That is a different question from the one the Trilemma claimed to have settled.
