Hi source:
No, I don’t think that is a good summation, nor is it a good analogy.
William Bartley: “[T]he claim that a rationalist need not commit himself even to argument is no claim that he will not or should not have strong convictions on which he is prepared to act. We can assume or be convinced of the truth of something without being committed to its truth.”
Although not perfect, a more congruent analogy would be something like building a solid foundation according to the best contemporary methods, then building a house on top of it, and living in the house with no worries for a presupposed indefinite amount of time (because we’re not afraid of the unknown, right?). While living in the house, years later there is some discovery that helps in building better foundations. Although your house is still sufficient for your short-term needs, you find that the new method for building foundations simply works better for you in the long-run.
[1] House number one worked fine for a while, and there was no reason to assume otherwise.
[2] All while living in house number one, there was also no problem in ever holding latent thoughts that better methods for building foundations would come along in the future.
[3] You move to a house with a better foundation as it is discovered, and then you go back to the first step, plugging in subsequent numbers for “one.”
My analogy of foundations of a house to the philosophical axioms wasn’t the same in nature as your analogy. I said implicitly “every house has its foundations.” You implicitly said “foundations of a house are made of something.” I am stating an absolute, you are not. Foundations of a house can clearly be made of something, but also of something else. But the fact remains that each and every one of them has foundations, whether it is a house built on Earth or in Earth’s orbit or on the third moon of Jupiter.
While your implicit statement implies the philosophical axioms (identified by AR), it is in no way related to philosophical questions, but rather to scientific/technical questions. The nature of philosophical axioms isn’t technical. Axioms state the obvious and irrefutable. They are not arbitrary statements, nor are they a result of something more fundamental than them, because that goes against the definition of an axiom.
An axiom says “existence exists.” There is no “research” you can do to find an axiom which is more “fundamental” than this. There is no basis for it, because to do so you must first assume that this is either false or isn’t a fundamental, obvious, self-evident truth. In either way, you must ignore the fact that existence exists and try to prove something else about existence. You must step outside of existence, into the realm of non-existence to prove something about existence. That is an absurdity and that is exactly what this “Pancritical Rationalism” suggests. And this in effect is why you are taken so unseriously on the board: because you try to attack and refute the obvious by accepting it, as saying something contrary to the axioms is impossible without accepting them implicitly in the first place.
To finish this, let me just say that you can’t reach an axiomatic conclusion. That is a contradiction in terms. Axioms can’t be proved and can’t be refuted. Try refuting one of the axioms of objectivism and I’ll run rings around you (thanks to OPAR). I suggest you read OPAR too. It discusses axioms in chapter 1.
