Couldn't it be restated as, "How do you know that you are capable of evaluating evidence accurately?"

This is my favorite apologetics channel, maybe outside of Capturing Christianity.

Great! I love your videos on presuppositionalism! I'm glad I'm still subscribed to your channel.

I think you are on to something here. I have been critical of presuppositionalism while also appreciating it. I'm still trying to understand some of the epistemological approaches, so take my inquiry here as heuristic and not argumentative in spirit. I agree there seems to be some equivocation around "circular," when one says that all reasoning is circular because reason must use reason to justify itself. I suspect that the equivocation is the result of not distinguishing justification of the reasoning process from justifications of a particular rational conclusion. Or put another way, distinguishing transcendental arguments about the necessity of self-justifying reason from non-self-justifying reasoning. Does that make sense? Is that similar to what you are saying? But if we accept this distinction, it seems that there might be a way to affirm the presuppositional insight, while also affirming the evidentialist insight. That is, what do you think about the idea that both approaches could be true at different levels? Namely, that there are domains of human action and belief which are foundational and self-justifying and even metaphysically and epistemologically necessary, and then there is are domains where these foundational realities are employed to generate valid reasoning on the basis of evidence and rational inference? I'm pushing in the direction of saying there is something right about evidentialist use of reason (which plays a big part in say evidentialist support of the bible as special revelation from God through arguments from fulfilled prophesy) and then saying there is something right about presupositional arguments that reason, while self-justifying and necessary, can't stand alone but must be connected to a theistic metaphysical structure that actually allows reason to function in relation to an pre-ordered world of sensible experience. You have a video where you speak about logic being both something which we have to use apriori, but can also be supported by evidential confirmation. I see this as pointing toward a confirmation of both transcendental presuppositionalism and evidentist argumentation. What is your big picture impression about my inclination to give a seat at the table to both? I'm curious if you have thought about this, but contrary to my leanings, think that one view is ultimately reduced to the other. Is that where you would lean at this point?

Presup fails at the outset for one simple purpose. It uses a revelational epistemology. A presuppositionalist cannot discern between a world with a God that cannot lie to them and a world with a God that can lie to them but tells you they cant. This coupled with the ergregious framework of their argumentation boiling down to "You cant have any axioms in your worldview but mine can have any amount of axioms I want" should turn anyone away from a conversation with a person that uses this apologetic

Thanks for the video! Can we formulate another version of the argument in “why should we use evidence to justify our arguments for belief?” Is there an infinite regress from here?

could you aply that to Performative contradiction ideia made by Habermas and Hoppe? It looks like he is based on a reliabilism epistemology.

Yes circular reasoning is needed at the source of any assumption. However the simpler assumptions with more explanatory power is a more probable assumption. For example the simplest reason why I can trust my reason to a decent degree is that I wouldn’t have survived if my reasoning couldn’t accurately map reality.

Are you using your reasoning when determining that God has revealed truth to you Sye? This is the worst apologetic method ever

17:20 I disagree. The reliability of epistemic faculties has to be assumed or tsken as self evident in order for reason to be trusted. Going eith thr pencil analogy itnwould be something like tour friend assuming thsy the letter was written by you wasnt a hoax.

@faithbecauseofreason8381 Regarding your thesis that "reasoning is an action, not a belief". Believe it or not, some "a priori libertarians" (the followers of either Murray Rothbard, or Hans-Herman Hoppe, or both) *actually do believe* that "justification for an action" and "justification for a belief" are *the exact same thing.* Anyone trying to separate these two concepts gets immediately called "irrational". And then they use a line of argument that is scarily similar to presuppositionalism. Saying "your argument is implicitly assuming MY position", and so on.

I’m glad you made this video. Very helpful

I think that the denotation of circular reasoning as a fallacy is unhelpful. Circular reasoning is not a momentary act in time, but a continuous system of mind that replaces any debunked arguments in a paradigm. It ultimately helps more to prompt them to put long theoretical tenets into action and show that they no longer serve them. This will not convert them to your side, but it will change their paradigm slightly. Ask me why I use my reasoning over others and I’ll say, it’s because I use a different path than my teacher, but come up with the same answer in all cases of objective necessary truth.

Have you heard of the Problem of the criteria? That's what I often see more sophisticated presups use as a backing to this argument, and they say no cogent response to it has ever been given

Thank you for the video. As I understand it, you are saying that it is the evidence that justifies. Reason being merely a bridge to reference the evidence and therefore not a product. The reliabilist sees the evidence as a product of a process and hence maintain that therefore the justification is external to the evidence(through a causal rational principle). What is evidence in your view? I may be oriented towards reliabilism, but I cannot understand evidence outside the rational, the rational not being merely a bridge, but the rational being constitutive of the evidence. All evidence to me is, as evidence, constituted by the rational(and not merely reasoning as a rational process). For example, in order to provide evidence of the pencil, you would show me the pencil. I take your position to be that the pencil itself is the objective evidence its own existence. Me showing you, or reasoning the existence of the pencil are secondary to the self-evidence of the pencil. In this case, the pencil's own existence is what sustains the evidence of the pencil, for the pencil is evident because there is a pencil. Yet, in this case, there's the idea of the pencil itself that is understood by the intellect. It is the pencil's essence and material existence that are captured by the rational. The pencil's own being cannot be separated from its essence and rational constitution. There is already something that ties the material configuration into an ideal constitution. Leaving aside the possible issue that we are defining what the idea of pencil is and then relating it to whether there is an objective object that corresponds to this humanly defined idea, if we are to make it so that there's an objective basis so that it is the pencil that provides its own evidence, we must then say that the pencil provides or reflects its own idea of pencil. This is more so the case if we are making a general and rational case for the existence of pencils. The rational is not a relational process between the individual and the objective reality, it is constitutive of the objective reality itself so that it's inseparable from it, and it is also inseparable in the realm of ideas(what is the substance of argumentation). This is almost necessary: if one wants to jump from the ideal(the argumentative, the philosophical) so that it reflects and corresponds to the actual(so that there's a separation between the process of referencing and the reality of the referred) there must also be a correspondence between the referred and the reference. I think there are also three issues beyond all this: a) How can we know that the referred is actual? b) How can we know that the reference captures its intended target? In this, I think you will say that given the self-evident nature of the referred object, it could not fail to obtain. c) Maybe I'm missing the point here, but the question seems also to be: how do we know the self-evident is self-evident in reality and by reality(in an objective sense), vs merely seeming self-evident? There is an appearance of self-evidence but how do I know this appearance of self-evidence arises out of the real self-evidence of the object? An example would be a hallucination, which is self-evident for the one having the hallucination, and yet we would seem to recognize this appearance, while self-evident for the subject, has no objective contitution in any real object and is indeed a product of the cognitive processes as opposed to merely being a reference to a self-evident object. I enjoy your videos and apologize if I'm missing the point in a stupid way.

If I know that I can't know anything, then I know something. Hm.

RIP headphone users at 19:31

Presuppositionalists are only good for making other apologists seem better than they are. Erik Manning is still a doofus but I'd always slap Sye first.

You cannot observe Evidentialism, in this case you present a theory for what JTB is, but it still doesn't escape the problem, since you have to justify why your theory for JTB is justified (you might claim that well I do not need to justify it that way because this form of justification isn't necessary in my worldview) but you still need to justify why this is the case. As an example how can an Evidentialist justify that his theory is better then another one? If the response is because evidentialism says so, the other person can say the same thing from within his own theory. There needs to be some sort of criteria that has to be justified by something which also needs justification, and that leads to infinite regress or circularity. There are a couple possibilities to solve this, but what you seem wanting to do in your videos is to appeal to epistemological intuition, which I myself am not an enemy of, but you will have a lot of troubles connecting justification with reason to epistemological intuition and trying to justify that with reason alone, without appealing to the subjective expirience of the audience. Or ending in some sort of semi solipsism when it comes to JTB.

Presupp literally undercuts all of this because its whole point is that none of these complaints are sensible unless you believe in an undergirding substrate that justifies them. Meta-logic is what this stuff is, and its impossible without A) god B) circularity.