Probabilistic empiricism

Abstract

Modal Empiricism in philosophy of science proposes to understand the possibility of modal knowledge from experience by replacing talk of possible worlds with talk of possible situations, which are coarse-grained, bounded and relative to background conditions. This allows for an induction towards objective necessity, assuming that actual situations are representative of possible ones. The main limitation of this epistemology is that it does not account for probabilistic knowledge. In this paper, we propose to extend Modal Empiricism to the probabilistic case, thus providing an inductivist epistemology for probabilistic knowledge. The key idea is that extreme probabilities, close to 1 and 0, serve as proxies for testing mild probabilities, using a principle of model combination.