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Fading Foundations

Part of the Synthese Library Book Series (volume 383)

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-58295-5

ISBN: 978-3-319-58294-8

Publisher: Springer International Publishing - Springer Journals

Jun 27, 2017

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Chapter 1The Regress Problem

Atkinson, David; Peijnenburg, Jeanne

Pages: 1 –24

[The attempt to justify our beliefs leads to the regress problem. We briefly recount the problem’s history and recall the two traditional solutions, foundationalism and coherentism, before turning to infinitism. According to infinitists, the regress problem is not a genuine difficulty, since...
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Chapter 2Epistemic Justification

Atkinson, David; Peijnenburg, Jeanne

Pages: 25 –58

[What is the nature of the justifier and of the justified, and how are they related? The answers to these questions depend on whether one embraces internalism or externalism. As far as the formal side of the justification relation is concerned, however, the difference between internalism and...
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Chapter 3The Probabilistic Regress

Atkinson, David; Peijnenburg, Jeanne

Pages: 59 –82

[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...
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Chapter 4Fading Foundations and the Emergence of Justification

Atkinson, David; Peijnenburg, Jeanne

Pages: 83 –100

[A probabilistic regress, if benign, is characterized by the feature of fading foundations: the effect of the foundational term in a finite chain diminishes as the chain becomes longer, and completely dies away in the limit. This feature implies that in an infinite chain the justification of the...
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Chapter 5Finite Minds

Atkinson, David; Peijnenburg, Jeanne

Pages: 101 –117

[Can finite minds encompass an infinite number of beliefs? There is a difference between being able to complete an infinite series and being able to compute its outcome; and justification is more than mere calculation. Yet the number of propositions or beliefs that are needed in order to reach a...
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Chapter 6Conceptual Objections

Atkinson, David; Peijnenburg, Jeanne

Pages: 119 –142

[There are two conceptual objections to the idea of justification by an infinite regress. First, there is no ground from which the justification can originate. Second, if a regress could justify a proposition, another regress could be found to justify its negation. We show that both objections...
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Chapter 7Higher-Order Probabilities

Atkinson, David; Peijnenburg, Jeanne

Pages: 143 –165

[At first sight, a hierarchical regress formed by probability statements about probability statements appears to be different from the probabilistic regress of the previous chapters. After all, the former involves higher and higherorder probabilities, whereas the latter is an epistemic chain in...
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Chapter 8Loops and Networks

Atkinson, David; Peijnenburg, Jeanne

Pages: 167 –190

[The analysis so far concerned only one-dimensional epistemic chains. In this chapter two extensions are investigated. The first treats loops rather than chains. We show that generally, i.e. in what we have called the usual class, infinite loops yield the same value for the target as do infinite...

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