Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

infinite regress. The infinite regress is familiar to children and their parents in another form – namely, questions that lead to further questions, that lead to further questions, that lead to… Why, Mum? Why, Dad? And the embattled parents will try to give an answer or otherwise resort to threats or distractions to avoid further interrogations. For my part, I usually managed around five why-questions of my mother, but only around three with my Dad.

The infinite regress is one of three ways in which truth manifests itself to us – according to Aristotle – the other ways being through circularity or through brute facts. This is

Aristotle, who, when asked if he was the most intelligent man in the world, argued that it was only because he knew one thing. But the one thing he knew was that he knew nothing. So, we might not hold out much hope of getting to any truth by the routes that Aristotle suggested. But nonetheless, it is worth digging a little deeper, because what all three of Aristotle’s suggestions offer us is an understanding of a certain fundamental paradox in the universe. Let’s go back to the piglets and their tins of meat. Perhaps what induced that vertigo in me as a child was the sense that the regress could go on forever, with ever-smaller piglets and tins. In reality, of course, there would come a point where the logo is going to be just too small for the next-smallest piglet to be recognisable. And so the regress stops. It reaches a practical limit, despite its theoretical infinity.

But what if we made that initial piglet as big as could be fitted into the universe? And, let’s say, initially, that the universe is finite – say 30 billion light years in diameter – for the sake of argument. It seems at least theoretically

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