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Fading Foundations
David Atkinson and Jeanne Peijnenburg
2017
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This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book addresses the age-old problem of infinite regresses in epistemology. How can we ever come to know something if knowing requires having good reasons, and reasons can only be good if they are backed by good reasons in turn? The problem has puzzled philosophers ever since antiquity, giving rise to what is often called Agrippa's Trilemma. The current volume approaches the old problem in a provocative and thoroughly contemporary way. Taking seriously the idea that good reasons are typically probabilistic in character, it develops and defends a new solution that challenges venerable philosophical intuitions and explains why they were mistakenly held. Key to the new solution is the phenomenon of fading foundations, according to which distant reasons are less important than those that are nearby. The phenomenon takes the sting out of Agrippa's Trilemma; moreover, since the theory that describes it is general and abstract, it is readily applicable outside epistemology, notably to debates on infinite regresses in metaphysics. The book is a potential game-changer and a must for any advanced student or researcher in the field.
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Keywords
- Business & management
- Economics, finance, business & management
- Epistemic Justification
- Epistemology
- History and Philosophical Foundations of Physics
- history of science
- Humanities
- Infinite Regress
- Management decision making
- Mathematical foundations
- Mathematical logic
- Mathematical Logic and Foundations
- Mathematics
- Mathematics & science
- open access
- Operational research
- Operations Research and Decision Theory
- Operations Research/Decision Theory
- Philosophical Foundations of Physics and Astronomy
- Philosophy
- Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge
- Probability & statistics
- Regresses in Epistemology
- Regresses in Ethics
- Regresses in Metaphysics
- Regresses in Philosophy of Mind
- Science: general issues
- Statistical Theory and Methods
- thema EDItEUR::K Economics, Finance, Business and Management::KJ Business and Management::KJT Operational research
- thema EDItEUR::P Mathematics and Science::PB Mathematics::PBC Mathematical foundations
- thema EDItEUR::P Mathematics and Science::PB Mathematics::PBT Probability and statistics
- thema EDItEUR::P Mathematics and Science::PD Science: general issues::PDX History of science
- thema EDItEUR::Q Philosophy and Religion::QD Philosophy::QDT Topics in philosophy::QDTK Philosophy: epistemology and theory of knowledge