Comment by haswell

This statement is self-refuting in multiple ways.

It is itself an assumption. It is assuming that it’s possible to have no external assumptions, that being wrong requires external assumptions, and that this principle is true. You’ve already violated your own standard.

Even basic logical reasoning requires assumptions. Like the principle of non-contradiction, or that our cognitive faculties can distinguish between valid and invalid inferences. Hegel’s work doesn’t actually proceed without assumptions either; it starts with the concept of “being” and builds from there using logical principles.

If you truly had no assumptions, you couldn’t even begin to reason or make any truth claims. You’d have no framework for distinguishing truth from falsehood, valid from invalid reasoning, or meaningful from meaningless statements.

You might avoid being wrong about empirical facts, but you’d also avoid being right about anything.

The real philosophical task isn’t to eliminate all assumptions (which is impossible), but to identify foundational commitments, examine them critically, and build carefully from the most defensible starting points we can find.

But those starting points are still assumptions, and at least for the time being, there’s no reason to believe we’ve sufficiently closed the knowledge gaps necessary to operate on anything but a base set of assumptions.