Does “Turtles all the way down” mean endless continuation / exercise similar to ‘peeling onions,’’ or does it represent sophism?

Question

I learned the phrase “Turtles all the way down,” popularized by Stephen Hawking in an answer to my latest question asking the meaning of the phrase, “Mercy within mercy within mercy."

Jmereno suggested that Thomas Merton’s famous phrase is similar to “Turtles all the way down.”

Does “Turtles all the way down” mean endless continuation or exercise of something like ‘peeling onions’ skin’ and ‘Russian matryoshka doll,’ or is it used for dodging a question or is it a simple sophism? I’m unable to judge based on the explanation by Wikipedia.

I should have asked this to the answerer, but I venture to put it as a question as this is different subject from my previous one.

Answer 1

"Turtles all the way down" emphasises the idea of endless continuation, and tends to be used when someone's argument is sort of circular and can't explain itself. So with the turtle on whose back the world sits, which sits on a turtle, which sits on a turtle, etc., we can't explain where the turtles come from, or why they're there, but they must be there otherwise what would our turtle be stood on?

Another example is an old idea of how the mind works: inside a human is a homunculus that understands how the worlds works and how to respond. That's how the mind works. This obviously raises the question: how does the homunculus know? Well, it has a homunculus of its own, and so on. You could say "it's homunculuses all the way in".

Answer 2

As a native English speaker, I know this phrase to mean "reductio ad infinitum". The turtle in the expression refers to the animal bearing the world-sky-universe in many cosmological myths. It's the child's objection to many origin-explanations.

Answer 3

In layman's terms, what [Kurt] Gödel did was show conclusively that humans do not live in a universe in which they can solve all problems and learn everything. It can never be done because the universe is infinite and human minds are not. In a way, Gödel's proof is a truth about systems of thought, not about the universe; it is about maps, and not about the territory they represent. What Gödel set out to prove is that the actual territory will always transcend the map.

In even simpler terms, as Zebrowski puts it, Gödel's proof can be explained this way: an elderly woman attends a meeting of philosophers concerned with the nature of the universe and tells them that the world rests on the back of a turtle. The chairman asks her to explain what this turtle stands on; she snaps back that it stands on the back of yet another turtle. "And what does that turtle stand on?" demands the chairman. The elderly woman shakes her finger and replies, "You can't fool me, sonny it's turtles all the way down!"

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/kurt-g-del#ixzz2fvrm7PD1

Answer 4

If the word "Turtles" be replaced by the word "Ideas", then misinterpretations dissolve.

Answer 5

As I understand it (and, no, I'm not going to offer a reference for this), the allusion is to one (or perhaps several) of the many explanations for how the "world" (as we know it, or, more correctly, knew it centuries ago) is "supported". The (supposed) argument was that the known world was riding on the back of a turtle, presumably adrift in the sea.

So, when the sage offering this bit of wisdom would be asked what supports that turtle, the answer would be of course an even larger turtle, and that on another, and so forth.

This is the sort of patently absurd argument which was popular prior to society accepting that the world is round and (apparently) floating in space. (And, contrary to myth, it was accepted that the earth is round well before Columbus.) This is also a proxy for the many arguments made, after the spherical nature of Earth was accepted, that Earth is the center of the universe, and, by extension, a proxy for many other anti-science "theories".

(And the fact that it happens to mesh nicely with "Yertle the Turtle" doesn't hurt either.)