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thomblake comments on Beginning at the Beginning - Less Wrong
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You don't always need a way to avoid infinite regress. It's one of the skeptical problems of justification, but as long as you're trying to justify things there's no good reason to prefer eliminating that one rather than any of the others.
I don't think infinite regress is an insurmountable problem for the notion that beliefs are rational when they can be justified recursively by rules. I want to acknowledge the skeptical problem of justification, but try to describe rationality in a way that belief systems including something like causation are rational, while belief systems like intelligent design are not.
"You describe belief systems like intelligent design as irrational by the very definition of the word rational?"
That's how definitions work, buddy. They indicate what words mean, and that has consequences for how they're used.
An problematic use of definitions would to be declare intelligent design to be irrational by definition - that is, the definition of 'intelligent design', not of 'rationality'.
I realized that possible interpretation as I was posting, and I tried to head it off by using the word "describe" rather than "define."
I think that the definition of rationality is an open question, though I'm sure it has properties which intelligent design violates. For instance, I would say that empirical arguments failing Occam's Razor, such as intelligent design, are not rational.
Basically, there are bunch of notions of rationality (some of which are competing), such that belief in something like causation is rational though unprovable, disbelief in failures by Occam's Razor is irrational, radical skepticism is irrational though irrefutable, logical fallacies and other deductive errors are irrational, etc... I think we are looking for a unifying description of rationality that encompasses all of them, if such a thing exists.