Creencia y probabilidad según Leibniz

VARGAS, EVELYN

Villa María

Encuentro; IV Encuentro Internacional sobre Historia y Filosofía de las Ciencias Formales; 2013

Universidad Nacional de Villa María

In many ways, early modern approach to knowledge may seem foreign to the contemporary discussion in epistemology. Both rationalist and empiricist thinkers are usually regarded as the representative figures of infallibilist and foundationalist positions. But questions concerning the epistemic status of opinion, belief and probability constitute a neglected portion of early modern epistemology which connects to topics of great interest in contemporary thinking about knowledge. The epistemology of what it is for a propositional attitude to count as justified has given way to innovative sub-fields such as the ethic of belief and virtue epistemology, for which the various forms of rational acceptance of beliefs and epistemic goals are central. Recent scholarship in the history of science has emphasized the growing seventeenth-century tendency to admit the less than certain. Once the scholastic goal of demonstrative scientia in the natural sciences was gradually abandoned in favor of the experimental knowledge that was being generated by scientific practice, the epistemic status of beliefs and knowledge claims were reassessed. Consequently, a radical revaluation of probable knowledge took place throughout the seventeenth century. English practices based on experiments can be contrasted to those of continental Europe; while the former included experiments as particular historical events, in the latter experiences of ?what happens all or most of the time? were conceived as axiomatic statements that could be employed as major terms in arguments. Leibniz, however, regarded testimonies as providing facts but at the same time being the grounds for an argument. And although late seventeenth-century saw the emergence of mathematical probability, as it culminated in the writings of Jakob Bernoulli, it is usually affirmed that classical probabilists since Bernoulli held that mathematical probabilities must measure degrees of belief, that is, human uncertainty rather than features of the world. But again, Leibniz?s definition of probability as ?degree of possibility? might challenge this received view. In sum, during the period the grounds of knowledge and belief were redefined in various ways by reshaping the realms of moral certainty, rational credibility and the probable