Abstract
According to infinitism, beliefs can be justified by an infinite chain of reasons. So far, infinitism has rarely been taken seriously and often even dismissed as inconsistent. However, Peijnenburg and Atkinson have recently argued that beliefs can indeed be justified by an infinite chain of reasons, if justification is understood probabilistically. In the following, I will discuss the formal result that has led to this conclusion. I will then introduce three probabilistic explications of justification and examine to which extent they support Peijnenburg’s and Atkinson’s claim.
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Notes
While Peijnenburg and Atkinson (2013) shared this view, they no longer do. See below and Peijnenburg and Atkinson (forthcoming).
As has been pointed out to me by an anonymous referee, the second problem can be avoided by weakening Unique Determination Justification to only require T to restrict the probability of \(\mathrm{t}_{0}\) to an interval with a lower bound above a specific threshold and to identify the degree of justification with this lower bound. This does not resolve the first problem, however.
References
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Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Jeanne Peijnenburg, David Atkinson and an anonymous reviewer for helpful discussions on earlier versions of this paper as well as to the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek for financial support under the project number 360-20-282.
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Bewersdorf, B. Infinitism and probabilistic justification. Synthese 191, 691–699 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0367-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0367-0