Epistemic Circularity

By Leo Gura - October 18, 2026

The entire challenge of epistemology is that the mind has no way of knowing right from wrong because it bases that distinction on its own internal criteria which it never knew was right in the first place. Right and wrong here aren’t moral but epistemic. Fundamentally, the mind gets lost in its own circularity. Whatever criteria you have for distinguishing right from wrong, or true from false, has never itself been proven right or true. The criteria your mind is using to know right from wrong are themselves wrong and the mind isn’t able to see it because at some point the mind needs to assume that some criteria is true and get on with its sense-making work. But the truth of that criteria is never established, it is assumed. The mind cannot work without taking some things for granted, which ends up being the source of the mind’s corruption and self-deception. It is similar to confirmation bias, but much much deeper. I am saying that the idea that, “Science is objective”, is a profound confirmation bias. But this problem is not limited to science.

When a scientist looks at the world, he looks at it through scientific criteria which he takes for granted as true, not realizing that his criteria was never proven but assumed, and since it was assumed, it could be wrong. But he blithely uses the criteria to do sense-making without ever digging deeper into his own mind to reconsider the rightness of the criteria. Every worldview works this way and suffers from this circularity problem. A paradigm is blind to its own criteria, as the eye does not see itself. Science or Christianity or Islam or Marxism or Zionism is used to see, therefore it does not see itself. The key question is: How do you know that your criteria for knowing right from wrong, true from false, is not itself wrong and false? Because the Mind is alone, it has no external frame of reference to anchor itself with. For example, in science, the scientist just assumes that everything must be scientific in order to be taken seriously. But what if that’s wrong? How would the scientist know? This is the question-begging Catch-22. The point is he doesn’t know but he thinks he knows. He doesn’t even see the circularity problem.

For any paradigm, when you ask the paradigm, “Are you right? Are you true?”, the paradigm looks at itself and uses itself to judge itself as right and true. You ask any paradigm, “Are you true?”, the paradigm looks at itself and cockily responds, “Yes, I am true.” But it says this even if it isn’t true. That’s the problem. The paradigm is using its own criteria to judge its own criteria. That’s the circularity, that’s the question-begging, that’s the fatal blind-spot, that’s the epistemic blunder. The criteria was never grounded in anything, because no ground exists. If a paradigm is wrong or false, then when it looks at itself to check itself for wrongness, it will appear to itself not as wrong but as right, precisely because it is wrong! Do you see that? That’s the entire trick. This is the crux of self-bias. Every worldview fails to see its own circularity, which the fatal flaw in every worldview. The point of epistemology is not to find the one true worldview, or to defend your favorite worldview, but to see that all worldviews suffer from blindness to their own circularity, and to escape this dynamic by getting the mind to catch itself being circular. The essence of a paradigm is really a set of assumed and unquestioned criteria. The point of epistemology is for the mind to become so flexible and so self-aware that it is able to objectively view and evaluate its own criteria, recognize them as limited, and transcend them.

This is the heart of philosophy; solving this problem. If you solve this problem you will unlock a new level of Mind, another order of Intelligence.

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