Abstract
During more than twenty years Clarence Irving Lewis and Hans Reichenbach pursued an unresolved debate that is relevant to the question of whether infinite epistemic chains make sense. Lewis, the nay-sayer, held that any probability statement presupposes a certainty, but Reichenbach profoundly disagreed. We present an example of a benign probabilistic regress, thus showing that Reichenbach was right. While in general one lacks a criterion for distinguishing a benign from a vicious regress, in the case of probabilistic regresses the watershed can be precisely delineated. The vast majority (‘the usual class’) is benign, while its complement (‘the exceptional class’) is vicious.
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Atkinson, D., Peijnenburg, J. (2017). The Probabilistic Regress. In: Fading Foundations. Synthese Library, vol 383. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58295-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58295-5_3
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58295-5
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