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Zkuq on 10 September 2017
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palou said:
Zkuq said:

Considering how much there is that I don't know, I'm not sure I can say I have any axioms. There's probably some core values, but nothing that's set in stone. I'm fairly open to good reasoning, and if I notice any faults in my views, I try to correct them. I can't come up with a thing I'm not ready to doubt to at least some extent, and that seems to be in a serious conflict with having axioms. As far as I'm concerned, having views set in stone is just bad unless they're logically sound, which almost no view probably is.

Somewhat paradoxically, I guess you could say my only axiom is that there should be no axioms.

There can be not justification without an axiom, though. If you are convinced by an argument, there has to be an axiom that is responds to better than your previous beliefs. As said, take any topic, and just imagine yourself a 3-year old that asks "but why" each time you justify your previous stance, until there's nothing left to justify with.

For most people, that is probably just not true. People are far from logical. They might seem logical at first glance but a closer look often reveals contradictions. I try to avoid them personally by adjusting my views to be consistent, but being human, I'm not sure it's even possible to achieve a logically consistent whole in practice. Following your 'why' route, I might be able to come up with some so-called axioms, but if I were to try to find all of my so-called axioms, I'd be surprised if at least some of them weren't contradicting each other in some way. Obviously correcting them might be possible, but it complicates things a lot. Life is complex, and breaking it down to a set of axioms I can really trust seems either ridiculously difficult or impossible. I can probably quite easily find a lot of general guidelines I feel very strongly about, but to call them axioms? No way. Perhaps in the context of this discussion, you'd be ready to call those general guidelines axioms due to how strongly I feel about them, but I'm definitely not.