For, on Aristotle's account, the "what it was to be" of an entity is that very entity understood as an immediate and
indemonstrable explanatory ground and principle.
(4) Morgan thought it a fiction insofar as it would be "difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate the[] proposition[] by factual evidence[,]" and that, to the contrary, it "might be somewhat easier, by the kind of evidence we usually require for the proof of any debatable proposition, to demonstrate that men are not created equal...." (5) But Morgan thought it "not inappropriate" to call equality a self-evident truth because such a designation "implies our commitment" to equality and "protects [it] from challenge." (6) All societies, Morgan suggests, are built on cornerstone commitments that are ultimately
indemonstrable. "[T]o challenge" our commitment to equality, says Morgan, "would rend the fabric of our society." (7)
First, far from being self-grounding, our knowledge of the
indemonstrable first principles that we need for the act of reasoning is but one testimony that reason is in fact groundless precisely because, at its base, we find not bedrock but light.
This was the principle or origin of all things; understood as the ultimate
indemonstrable principle.
It is in this sense that 'depth psychology's dream theories exert violence since the beginning, both on the dream state and on what is dreamed, by means of biased and abstract conceptualizations/.../ based on completely
indemonstrable propositions' (Boss, 1977: pp 7-10).
William of Auxerre, in charge of purging the Libri naturales by Aristotle, showed in his Summa aurea that the relation between the
indemonstrable premises and the scientific conclusion is identical to the relation between the articles of faith and the theological conclusion: "[...] a theological science, according to Aristotelian criteria of scientificity, so is the ideal that subsidizes [...] the Summa aurea" (LIBERA, 1993, p.
Westfahl also takes what he admits is an
indemonstrable position, which is that the original Star Trek television series may have had a "subliminal impact" on space program planners that in some way contributed to the Challenger disaster in 1986, as NASA may have unintentionally viewed the shuttle "as its own version of Star Trek" and so on some level may not have paid the sort of careful attention to detail that might have caught the problematic O-rings that caused the ship's explosion (138).