Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Trilemma
/traɪˈlɛmə/noun
A choice among three options, each carrying a cost, or an argument that forces one.
The Greek roots
τρι-
tri-
three
λῆμμα
lêmma
premise, thing taken
Literally: “three things taken”
The story of the word
Built in the seventeenth century on the model of dilemma, itself a late Greek term of rhetoric for the two-horned argument that traps an opponent either way. Lêmma is something taken, from lambánō, and mathematics kept the older sense: a lemma is a proposition picked up on the way to a theorem. The Münchhausen trilemma is the sharpest version, holding that any justification ends in infinite regress, circularity, or an arbitrary stop.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
dilemmalemmatripodtriad
In a sentence
Central bankers know the open-economy trilemma: pick two of free capital, a fixed rate, and an independent monetary policy.