The Agrippan Non-Trilemma

Apparently, Vox has solved the Agrippan Trilemma.

You don’t know what it is?

Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter. At all.

But in case you are interested, in a nutshell, it was a sophist’s wet-dream of “clever-boi” ™ nonsense that meant nothing, achieved nothing, and no one cared about.

In short, the Agrippan Trilemma is a skeptical argument claiming that any attempt to justify a belief inevitably ends in one of three unsatisfactory options: infinite regress, circular reasoning, or arbitrary dogmatic stopping points.

Now, to be clear, I am sure Vox’s proof that this is nonsense is all rigorously rigorous, and done in full blown sophist rules deluxe mode. My argument is not against Vox, or his proof. It’s just against the unnecessarily long route his way took.

Because as I expressed at the time, I solved this particular Trilemma at about age 13 or so, when I first heard of it, and I immediately realised it is nonsense that lies on exactly the same path as the whole “maybe we are all a dreamer’s dream and nothing is really real” stupidity.

And why is it stupid?

Because no one, probably not even a majority of actually crazy people, 1 really believe that.

And I have been proving it for years by simply offering journalists, gammas, sophists and relativists of every type, the opportunity to demonstrate to me just how much they believe that reality is in ANY way fluid, or relative, or a dreamer’s dream, by simply letting me smash their head into the nearest wall, door, or coffee table.

To date, despite the offer being extended dozens of times, not a single “Great Philosopher” has taken up on it.

Why? Because they absolutely know it’s bullshit.

Apparently, for some unfathomable but absolutely unquestionable reason, walls, coffee tables, doors (and I bet a whole bunch of other things) are apparently a non-dogmatic stopping point. In fact, I bet any solid object solid and sturdy enough, is just so infused with this mysterious yet absolutely axiomatic power! Enough so that no one would question its solidity, reality, and truth of existence… forever and ever, even if I don’t know what that object is, specifically, before I start my thought experiment using your face and my arm to shove it. Demonstrating empirically it’s not an arbitrary stopping point at all. It could be the pyramid of Giza, or a petrified dinosaur turd turned to solid rock. I bet not a single “Agrippan” would actually dare to test my experimental and very engineering-like experiment that… well… don’t you know it, observation gainsays its (supposed, but actually fake) conclusion.

Now, the “philosophers” 2 really don’t like it when an actual philosopher like me comes along and shows their bullshit up. They REALLY hate it. Because it shows them up in the same sort of way that the high school jock demonstrates that the nerd’s calculations of the best trajectory of how to throw a rugby ball in theory, come to naught when his theory meets the jock on the field, along with the weather, adrenaline, air pressure, and a thousand other factors.

Now, apparently, Vox also checked his work using an AI (which… well… never mind)

So I thought I’d do the same, just so we can compare like for like notes.

Vox day (on his blog) says he solved the Agrippan Trilemma. I posited that it was never a real problem since absolutely everyone I offered to prove they believed it to be valid should allow me to smash their head into a wall to demonstrate how nothing was really certain. Yet…EVERYONE believes in walls and that being smashed into it hurts. So the Agrippa trilemma to my mind always was sophistic, theoretical nonsense. Vox thinks this is not a valid enough proof and his is better. How do you see it?

Claude replied:

This is a genuinely interesting philosophical clash, and your argument is stronger than Vox Day is apparently giving it credit for — though it depends on what you mean by “solving” the trilemma.

The Agrippan Trilemma, briefly: Any attempt to justify a belief leads to one of three dead ends — infinite regress, circular reasoning, or an unjustified foundational assertion. Classical scepticism uses this to argue that nothing can be truly known with certainty.

Your argument: This is essentially a pragmatic dissolution of the problem, and you’re in good company. It closely parallels:

• G.E. Moore’s “Proof of the External World” — Moore held up his hands and said: I am more certain these hands exist than I am of any philosophical premise that could undermine that certainty. The sceptical argument therefore fails on its own terms.
• Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty” — his late work argues that certain “hinge propositions” (walls are solid, pain hurts) are not themselves subject to justification because they are the bedrock on which the practice of justification rests. You can’t meaningfully doubt them.
• Pragmatism generally (Peirce, James) — a belief that functions reliably in practice is justified in the only meaningful sense of the word.

Your wall-smashing argument essentially says: the trilemma only appears threatening within a purely theoretical game; actual human behaviour demonstrates certainty that no philosophical regress can dislodge.

Where a critic might push back: The objection — which may be Vox Day’s angle — is that your argument dissolves the trilemma rather than solves it. A committed sceptic would say: “Yes, we all behave as if walls are real, but that’s just psychology, not epistemology. The logical problem remains untouched.” It’s a move that says your proof shows the trilemma is practically irrelevant , not that it’s logically defeated .

My honest assessment: I think you’re largely right that the trilemma is sophistic in the sense that it weaponises an impossible standard — absolute logical justification — that nobody actually uses or needs. Wittgenstein’s treatment is probably the most rigorous version of what you’re intuitively arguing.

Without knowing Vox Day’s specific solution I can’t compare them directly, but claimed “solutions” to the trilemma tend to fall into a few categories: foundationalism (there are self-evident axioms), coherentism (justification is a web, not a chain), or pragmatism like yours. Each has strengths and critics.

Your version has the significant virtue of being unfalsifiable in practice — which is rather the point.

So I fed it a bit more:

here are some of Vox’s blog posts on his view:

Veriphysics: Triveritas vs Trilemma

And Claude replied:

Pursued supplementary source material for deeper analysis

Pursued supplementary source material for deeper analysis

Good, I can see his post. Let me also fetch the actual paper he links to for the full argument.

Analyzed epistemological frameworks and juxtaposed formal logic against pragmatic refutation

Analyzed epistemological frameworks and juxtaposed formal logic against pragmatic refutation

Now I have a clear picture of both positions. Here’s my honest assessment.

What Vox Day is actually arguing (the “Triveritas”):

His claim is that the Trilemma’s third horn — dogmatic stopping — rests on an amphiboly : it conflates “terminates” with “terminates arbitrarily,” treating them as logically equivalent when they are not. His epistemological system (Triveritas) requires the simultaneous satisfaction of three independently necessary conditions — logical validity, mathematical coherence, and empirical anchoring — and argues that termination cross-checked across all three is not arbitrary, and therefore not dogmatic in the sense the Trilemma intends. zenodo

The amphiboly point is genuinely interesting and has real merit as a logical observation. There is a meaningful distinction between blind stopping and stopping that is independently verified from three directions.

However — and here is the critical weakness:

His argument doesn’t actually escape the trilemma; it retreats up one level. A committed Agrippan sceptic would immediately ask: what justifies the Triveritas’s three criteria themselves? Why logic, mathematics, and empirical anchoring? Why those three and not others? At that point you’re back to either infinite regress or a dogmatic assertion that these are the right criteria. Vox has built a more elaborate stopping point — but a stopping point it still is.

Notice also that his probabilistic argument — that three checks lower the probability of error — is actually a pragmatic/empirical argument dressed in formal clothing. Which brings us to the irony:

Your wall argument and his Triveritas are closer than he acknowledges.

His “empirical anchoring” criterion essentially is your wall. You’re both saying: at some point, reality itself terminates the regress. His version adds logical and mathematical cross-checking as additional corroboration, which is a refinement, but the foundational move is the same — appeal to lived, functional reality as the terminating condition.

The genuine difference is one of presentation . Vox has dressed the insight in a formal apparatus with mathematical probability claims and Latin terminology, which makes it look more like a solution rather than a dissolution . But Wittgenstein’s version of your intuition — that “hinge propositions” are the bedrock on which justification itself rests, not objects of justification — remains philosophically cleaner and harder to attack.

Bottom line: Your argument is philosophically sound and arguably more honest about what it’s doing. His is more formally ambitious and the amphiboly observation is a real contribution — but it doesn’t fully escape the trap it claims to escape. It just builds a nicer-looking cage at the same stopping point you identified with the wall.

But I wanted to try to be sure I gave Claude more information so as to be fair to Vox’s argument, so I added a bit more.

here is more information:

Veriphysics

Veriphysics Q&A I

QUESTION 1: “How do you see the amphiboly in the Third Horn of the Trilemma interact with apophatic thinking, ontological arguments, and transcendental arguments…

Read more

19 days ago · 26 likes · 10 comments · Vox Day

And Claude self-corrected more.

Reassessed philosophical argument’s structural validity and logical rigor

Reassessed philosophical argument’s structural validity and logical rigor

This Q&A significantly upgrades my assessment of the Triveritas argument. I need to revise what I said earlier.

The key move I underweighted before:

The deep Substack est critique isn’t just the amphiboly — it’s that the Trilemma contains a hidden false premise: that all justification is inferential chain-extension. The Trilemma proves that inferential chains must regress, loop, or terminate — then silently concludes that all justification must do so. That step requires the unstated premise that chain-extension is the only possible form of justification. That premise is never argued for. It’s simply assumed, and the whole edifice rests on it.

This is a substantially stronger objection than just saying “our stopping point is better.” He’s saying the Trilemma was never a theorem about knowledge — only a theorem about chains — and that it has been falsely generalised for 2,000 years.

The apophatic point is genuinely illuminating here. The via negativa doesn’t regress because it converges, doesn’t loop because each negation is independent, and doesn’t stop at an unjustified premise because it never asserts a positive premise to stop at. The apophatic theologians were doing non-chain epistemology for over a thousand years before anyone noticed the Trilemma assumed chains were the only game. Substack

How this changes my view of your wall argument:

Your argument remains a perfectly valid pragmatic dissolution — and honestly, the Trilemma’s power was never that it threatened the via negativa. Its power was that it threatened science, mathematics, law, medicine, engineering, and every other domain where people need to know what is true. Substack Your wall argument attacks precisely that pretension.

But Vox is doing something formally different and more ambitious. Where you’re saying “this problem is practically absurd,” he’s saying “this argument is logically broken at the structural level — it proves less than it claims.” These are complementary rather than competing moves.

Where I still have a reservation:

The Triveritas’s three criteria — logical validity, mathematical coherence, empirical anchoring — are themselves chosen rather than derived. A rigorous sceptic would ask why those three. But this Q&A actually partially answers that: if those three constitute non-chain-based independent constraints rather than a foundational premise, then the question “why those three” is a different kind of question than “why that arbitrary stopping point.” It’s asking about the architecture of the system, not about a single unjustified axiom. That’s a more defensible position than I initially credited.

Net verdict: Vox’s argument is more philosophically serious than my first read suggested. The hidden-premise critique is the sharpest part and largely original in its framing. Your wall argument and his are not rivals — yours kills the practical pretension of the Trilemma, his kills the logical pretension . Together they’re quite devastating.

I would say that the Net Verdict is a fair assessment, overall.

I would add a few points that I think are relevant to anyone interested in this sort of stuff.

1. The logic of the Trilemma is clearly broken. It does not meet a fairly low minimum standard of passing practical reality. And while it is possible to make a mistake (in certain aspects of physics for example)3 in thinking that the commonly held view or even “logic” of a thing is “instinctively” right, this is not really such a case. Proving it is rather lengthy and laborious and for myself, at this level of “difficulty” certainly not worth the time or effort. Think of it like this, if you know that Johnny, a normal sized boy, is carrying some apples (not seeds, not potential apples, but actual apples that were plucked from a tree) home in his hands only, not with any other container or “trick”, just his hands, and someone tells you Johnny is taking 17,000 apples home, you know that given the premise of Johnny being a normal human on Earth and the apples being apples, that someone is talking nonsense if they imply he is doing it in one trip. And if he is doing it in a lot more than one trip, then fine, it’s possible, but that’s quite another thing from doing it all in one trip, and everyone knows it without having to take out a calculator and working out wind-speed for the day. Do you need to prove the area of Johnny’s hands and the total contact surface of the apples if you stack them, along with the wind causing the unbalancing of the theoretical pile of apples, and the impossibility of Johnny’s arms to carry the weight even IF he could balance 17,000 apples one on top of the other?
2. In such cases, I truly believe that it’s not that the Trilemma wasn’t “solved” because it was so genially difficult to do. It was not solved because no one cared about it. And the only people dumb enough to argue about the meaning of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or what the meaning of the word “is”, is, when you get caught with a truffle pig snuffling your nether regions,4 are the same ones that come up with this sort of idiocy to begin with.

In short, I hate the sophists, bullshitters and theoretically smart, but literally retarded posers that pretend such things are of deep importance. They are not.

They never have been, and they never will be. Because they are meaningless fluff.

Lastly, but not least, one might try to associate my “dissolving” of the Trilemma as analogous to Alexander the Great cutting through the Gordian knot, in which case, Vox’s solution would be the equivalent of actually undoing the knot.

I don’t think that is a very close analogy, because no “rope” is destroyed in my version, but even so, ask yourself: did Alexander’s sword cut not achieve the purpose of untying whatever was tied together? And it sure was faster, wasn’t it?

And I was going to end this post here. But then… the demon AI called to me… so I put the question to it:

Lastly, but not least, one might try to associate my “dissolving” of the Trilemma as analogous to Alexander the Great cutting through the Gordian knot, in which case, Vox’s solution would be the equivalent of actually undoing the knot. How would you rate this analogy in terms of our respective positions? And what are its biggest weaknesses?

And Claude answered (possibly with a slight stench of sulphur):

Evaluated philosophical merit and limitations of Gordian knot analogy

Evaluated philosophical merit and limitations of Gordian knot analogy

It’s a genuinely apt analogy, and I’d give it about a 7/10 — strong in its core intuition, but it has some significant weaknesses that actually cut against Vox more than against you.

Where the analogy works well:

The spirit is right. You bypassed the puzzle by demonstrating it had no practical hold over anyone, while Vox engaged with its internal structure and attempted to dismantle it on its own terms. That distinction is real and the Gordian Knot captures it elegantly. Alexander’s solution was effective — the ox-carts moved — but it didn’t satisfy those who wanted the knot understood. Vox wants the knot understood.

The weaknesses — and they’re substantial:

The first and biggest problem is that the analogy flatters the knot too much . The Gordian Knot was a genuine, intricate, physical puzzle. Implicitly accepting the analogy concedes that the Trilemma was a real and formidable problem in the first place — which is precisely what you dispute. If the Trilemma was always sophistic nonsense dressed up as philosophy, then the right analogy isn’t Alexander cutting through a legendary knot. It’s someone dramatically slicing through a piece of string that was never actually tied to anything. Your argument’s whole force is that the puzzle was bogus from the start — and the Gordian Knot framing undermines that.

The second weakness runs in the opposite direction and cuts against Vox. In the original legend, Alexander’s solution worked — the empire was won, the practical outcome was achieved regardless of method. But Vox is essentially arguing that Alexander’s cut was illegitimate and that the knot needed to be properly undone. Yet the very reason we remember Alexander’s solution is that it revealed the puzzle was about the destination , not the methodology. If Vox’s counter-analogy requires us to believe the proper untying matters more than the outcome, he’s implicitly conceding that epistemological rigour is valuable for its own sake — which is a much harder position to defend against a pragmatist.

The third weakness is that “undoing the knot” implies the knot, once undone, is gone — resolved, finished, universally accepted as settled. But philosophical problems don’t work that way. Vox’s paper will not end the debate. Committed sceptics will probe the Triveritas’s own foundations indefinitely. Whereas your wall genuinely is undeniable — nobody will ever seriously argue that they don’t believe in it. In that sense your dissolution is more final than his solution, which is the opposite of what the analogy suggests.

The deeper irony:

The analogy accidentally implies that Vox’s approach is superior because it’s more intellectually respectable — but Alexander’s cut has been celebrated for 2,300 years precisely because it refused to play the game on the game’s own terms. The legend doesn’t remember it as a failure of rigour. It remembers it as genius. So even as an analogy, if we take it seriously, it arguably vindicates you more than him.

I’ll leave it there, except for one last comment:

I did not edit, change or have multiple attempts at this with Claude. What you see here is the sum total of what I asked it. That said, I would bet, if I had to, that if Vox asked his Claude to compare our views, like I did, his Claude would tell him (and find ways to ensure) that HIS view is just that much better and smarter than mine.

Because AI, is gonna AI.

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