Your argument is about as valid as “Take it on faith”. Unless appealing to pragmatism, your argument is circular in using the belief of others when you can’t justifiably assume their existence. Second, your argument is irrational in that it appeals to “Everybody believes X” to support X. Thirdly, a source claiming X to be so is only evidence for X being so if you have reason to consider the source reliable.
You are also mixing up “epistemic order” with “empirical order”, to frame two new concepts. “Epistemic order” represents orders of inference- if I infer A from B and B from C, then C is prior to B and B is prior to A in epistemic order regardless of the real-world relation of whatever they are. “Empirical order”, of course, represents what is the empirical cause of what (if indeed anything causes anything).
A person detects their own thoughts in a different way from the way they detect their own senses, so they are unrelated in epistemic order. You raise a valid point about assuming that one’s thoughts really are one’s thoughts, but unless resorting to the Memory Argument (which is part of the Evil Demon argument I discussed) they are at least avaliable as arguments to consider.
The Foundationalist skeptic is arguing that believing in the existence of the world IS IRRATIONAL. Without resorting to the arguments I describe in the first post, there seems to be no way to get around this. Pragmatics clearly isn’t one, after all.
Your argument is about as valid as “Take it on faith”. Unless appealing to pragmatism, your argument is circular in using the belief of others when you can’t justifiably assume their existence. Second, your argument is irrational in that it appeals to “Everybody believes X” to support X. Thirdly, a source claiming X to be so is only evidence for X being so if you have reason to consider the source reliable.
You are also mixing up “epistemic order” with “empirical order”, to frame two new concepts. “Epistemic order” represents orders of inference- if I infer A from B and B from C, then C is prior to B and B is prior to A in epistemic order regardless of the real-world relation of whatever they are. “Empirical order”, of course, represents what is the empirical cause of what (if indeed anything causes anything).
A person detects their own thoughts in a different way from the way they detect their own senses, so they are unrelated in epistemic order. You raise a valid point about assuming that one’s thoughts really are one’s thoughts, but unless resorting to the Memory Argument (which is part of the Evil Demon argument I discussed) they are at least avaliable as arguments to consider.
The Foundationalist skeptic is arguing that believing in the existence of the world IS IRRATIONAL. Without resorting to the arguments I describe in the first post, there seems to be no way to get around this. Pragmatics clearly isn’t one, after all.