The "going concern world" challenge

 I have fairly frequently used a diagram illustrating our worldviews challenges, that speaks of our going concern world:

This, of course, echoes the common business term, the going concern. What it addresses is that long before we of the current generation came along, there was a world in being, playing out dynamics and leaving traces including those of history and of accumulated knowledge. Just to fix to something concrete, consider the context and background involved in this mom-and-pop machinist business in Australia, as it sets about repairing a broken hydraulic arm for an industrial machine:  

In our epistemology-haunted civilisation that is often tempted to give hyperskepticism a default over knowledge, this sort of situation opens up the force of the late Dallas Willard's expansion of the definition of knowledge:

To have knowledge . . . is to be able to represent something as it is on an adequate basis of thought or experience, not to exclude communications from qualified sources (“authority”) [--> compare, "warranted, credibly true (and so, reliable) belief"] This is the “knowledge” of ordinary life [--> knowledge belongs to the people], and it is what you expect of your electrician, auto mechanic, math teacher, and physician. Knowledge is not rare, and it is not esoteric . . . .  

[K]nowledge authorizes one to act, to direct action, to develop and supervise policy, and to teach. It does so because, as everyone assumes, it enables us to deal more successfully with reality: with what we can count on, have to deal with, or are apt to have bruising encounters with. Knowledge involves assured [--> I substitute here, warranted, credible]  truth . . .  [pp. 4, 19 & 20:  Dallas Willard & Literary Heirs, The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, Routledge|Taylor& Francis Group, 2018. It is worth using a light dusting of algebra to show the undeniability of objective knowledge:

a: Take any reasonably identifiable field of focus, but it is convenient to use morality, M, the subject that deals with good/evil, duty and honour, right and wrong etc, and 

b: identify the claim, there  is no objective moral knowledge -- i.e. there are no claimed moral truths that are well warranted so independent of the error-prone idiosyncrasies of a given personality -- and represent it: ~k(M).

c: Now, ~k(M) is about M (thus every particular moral truth claim m1, m2, m3 . . . mk . . . ), implying that for any asserted positive moral truth, it is objectively the case that ~k(mk) obtains [or else, it would be mere giving of idiosyncratic opinion]; and so it manifestly properly belongs to M, it is a part of that domain of thought, study and analysis.

 d: So, ~k(M) is self referential and self denying, i.e. it refutes itself and is false. This being a case of a commonplace on core claims about central, foundational, hard questions, part of why they bristle with difficulties is that they are deeply self-referential.) Thus,

 e: instead, ~[~k(M)] = k(M) obtains, i.e. the first objective moral truth is, there are objective moral truths. 

f: As a first substantial, indeed self evident moral truth, it is wrong, wicked, evil to kidnap a young child, then bind, sexually torture, rape and murder her for one's sick pleasure. (Those who try to deny, evade, dismiss or distract attention from this yardstick case simply show themselves to be monstrous.)]

The obvious, instant challenge here, is that knowledge confers credibility and so legitimate authority; which irks those inclined to overthrow our legacy civilisation and its traditional institutions. To all such, I say, knowledge belongs to the people and to the real world of competence. Knowledge, in the common received sense, is a commonplace, not a vanishingly rare commodity.

Any intellectual scheme that implies that warranted so objective knowledge is not real, is refuted and fallacious, especially global or rhetorically selective hyperskepticism. Such specifically includes schemes that imply, suggest or invite an infinite chain of required definitions, axioms and proofs, or that our knowledge base is hopelessly circular or ill defined, or that language generally fails at communication (or is irretrievably ambiguous), or that only what is reduced to an algebraic logical scheme is sufficiently exact to be trustworthy, etc. All of this is simply an extension of the principle that as our core discussions are inescapably self-referential, any scheme that leads to grand delusion is self-defeating and absurd.

All of this, is part of our going concern world.

Moreover, that going concern world frame implies that the origins, roots and nature of the world must be such that we are possible and indeed actual. This sort of generic, weak anthropic premise, actually constrains the plausibility of worldviews and associated philosophical, scientific, ideological, religious, historical and natural history claims. So much so, that this preliminary body of considerations must be considered as a preface to and due constraint on any speculative philosophical, epistemological/skeptical and logical scheme. Where, it is helpful for such intellectual ventures to first explicitly acknowledge that going concern world framework.

For example, it seems fairly clear that we are rational (though error-prone), responsible, significantly free, morally governed creatures: finite, fallible, morally challenged, too often ill-willed and stubborn or even willfully blind. In that context, it seems clear that say, Dawkins' remark in River out of Eden (1995) is clangingly, absurdly wrong:

Indeed, it has long been known that something is grossly wrong with lab coat clad scientific atheism (and this shows that no, Dawkins is not making an idiosyncratic error that can be brushed aside; instead, he is just caught in a characteristic, cat-out-of-the-bag moment of inconvenient candour):

 It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.” ["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209.]

No wonder, Thomas Reid had long since observed that "[h]e must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me, that would reason me out of my reason and senses."

Their name, sadly, is Legion.

Instead of the suggested amoral  world of pitiless, pointless, mindless indifference, we may ponder Cicero's built-in roots of the natural law, our first duties of reason:

Of course, it is highly controversial to suggest that the only serious candidate reality root that bridges the IS-OUGHT gap is the inherently good, utterly wise creator God. The answer to that is, this is philosophy not dogma, propose and defend a candidate of your own: _____ . It will, however, all too soon emerge that of the live option candidates, it is hard indeed to come up with another . . . going concern world . . . factually adequate, coherent, explanatorily balanced alternative. Already, Dawkins shows how the institutionally dominant evolutionary materialistic scientism fails. 

Trying to pull a world out of utter non being is even more embarrassing:

The small-g gods of paganism (and no, this is not a dirty word) are simply not world root reality. And of theism and its kissing cousins, we may see:

In short, we can see how a natural language based exploration of the going concern world lends to clearing the ground for productive reflections. END