How To Do Things With an Infinte Regress

Scientific methods may be viewed as procedures for converging to the true answer to a given empirical question. Typically, such methods converge to the truth only if certain empirical presuppositions are satisfied, which raises the question whether the presuppositions are satisfied. Another scientific method can be applied to this empirical question, and so forth, occasioning an empirical regress. So there is an obvious question about the point of such a regress. This paper explains how to assess the methodological worth of a methodological regress by solving for the strongest sense of single-method performance that can be achieved given that such a regress exists. Several types of regresses are “collapsed” into corresponding concepts of single method performance in this sense. The idea bears on some other issues in the philosophy of science, including Popper’s falsificationism and its relationship to Duhem’s problem. CONFIRMATION AND NATURALISM Here is a familiar but unsatisfying approach to the philosophy of science. Science seeks to “justify” empirical hypotheses. Usually, evidence does not and never will entail them, so they must be “justified” in some weaker way. So there must be a relation of “partial support” or “confirmation” or “empirical rationality” falling short of full (deductive) support that justifies them. The principal task of the philosophy of science is to “explicate” the relation of empirical justification from practice and from historical examples. Any feature of scientific method or procedure that is not derived from this relation is extraneous to the philosophy of science per se, although it may be of tangential psychological, sociological, or purely computational interest. Thus, virtues such as confirmation, explanation, simplicity, and testing are normatively and philosophically relevant, but the logic of discovery (procedures for inventing new hypotheses) and procedural efficiency are beside the point (e.g., Laudan 1980). The trouble with this approach is that explicating the justification relation (supposing it to be possible at all) does not begin to explain why justification should be as it is rather than some other way. Convincing, a priori answers are not forthcoming and attempts to provide them are no longer in fashion. One responds, instead, with the naturalistic view that if scientific standards are to be justified, that justification must itself be scientific (i.e., empirical). The next question is how scientific reasoning can justify itself. Circular justifications are more popular than infinite regresses of justification in the philosophical literature (somehow an infinite regress of justifications never “fires” or “gets started”), but it is hard to explain what the point of circles or regresses of justification could possibly be without first knowing what the point of justification, itself, is. And the