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Given the centrality of arguments from vicious infinite regress to our philosophical reasoning, it is little wonder that they should also appear on the catalogue of arguments offered in defense of theses that pertain to the fundamental structure of reality. In particular, the metaphysical foundationalist will argue that, on pain of vicious infinite regress, there must be something fundamental. But why think that infinite regresses of grounds are vicious? I explore existing proposed accounts of viciousness cast in terms of contradictions, dependence, failed reductive theories and parsimony. I argue that no one of these accounts adequately captures the conditions under which an infinite regress—any infinite regress—is vicious as opposed to benign. In their place, I suggest an account of viciousness in terms of explanatory failure. If this account is correct, infinite grounding regresses are not necessarily vicious; and we must be much more careful employing such arguments to the conclusion that there has to be something fundamental.

Metaphysicians of a certain stripe are almost unanimously of the view that grounding is necessarily irreflexive, asymmetric, transitive, and well-founded. They deny the possibility of circles of ground and, therewith, the possibility of species of metaphysical coherentism. But what's so bad about circles of ground? One problem for coherentism might be that it ushers in anti-foundationalism: grounding loops give rise to infinite regresses. And this is bad because infinite grounding regresses are vicious. This article argues that circles of ground do not necessarily give rise to infinite regresses, and where they do, those regresses are not necessarily vicious.

In \"Justification Without Awareness\", Michael Bergmann divides internalist epistemologies into those with a strong awareness requirement and those with a weak awareness requirement; he presents a dilemma, hoisting the \"strongs\" on one horn, and the \"weaks\" on the other. Here I reply on behalf of the strongawareness view, presenting what I take to be a more satisfactory, and more fundamental, reply to Bergmann than I believe has been offered by his other critics, and in particular by Rogers and Matheson in their \"Bergmann's dilemma: exit strategies for internalists,\" with which I am in partial agreement.

This article seeks to state, first, what traditionally has been assumed must be the case in order for an infinite epistemic regress to arise. It identifies three assumptions. Next it discusses Jeanne Peijnenburg's and David Atkinson's setting up of their argument for the claim that some infinite epistemic regresses can actually be completed and hence that, in addition to foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism, there is yet another solution (if only a partial one) to the traditional epistemic regress problem. The article argues that Peijnenburg and Atkinson fail to address the traditional regress problem, as they don't adopt all of the three assumptions that underlie the traditional regress problem. It also points to a problem in the notion of making probable that Peijnenburg and Atkinson use in their account of justification.

This paper discusses a novel response to two closely related regress arguments from Bolzano’s Theory of Science and Carroll’s What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. Bolzano’s argument aims to refute the thesis that full grounds must include propositions involving notions such as entailment, grounding or lawhood which link the respective grounds to their groundee. This thesis is motivated, Bolzano’s argument is reconstructed, and a response based on self-referential linking propositions is developed and defended against objections concerning self-reference and Curry’s paradox. Finally, the idea is applied to a reading of Carroll’s dialogue and a corresponding solution to the so-called infinite regress problem of inference is proposed.

Those who wish to claim that all facts about grounding are themselves grounded (\"the meta-grounding thesis\") must defend against the charge that such a claim leads to infinite regress and violates the well-foundedness of ground. In this paper, we defend. First, we explore three distinct but related notions of \"well-founded\", which are often conflated, and three corresponding notions of infinite regress. We explore the entailment relations between these notions. We conclude that the meta-grounding thesis need not lead to tension with any of the three notions of \"well-founded\". Finally, we explore the details of and motivations for further conditions on ground that one might add to generate a conflict between the meta-grounding thesis and a well-founded constraint. We explore these topics by developing and utilizing a formal framework based on the notion of a grounding structure.

Infinite regress lies within every democratic procedural choice. If society members try to select an appropriate rule [social choice correspondence (SCC)] entirely endogenously, they will need an appropriate rule to choose such a rule. However, this should also be selected by an appropriate rule to choose a rule to choose a rule, and so on. This paper explores how to solve this infinite regress. A preference profile over the set of alternatives is said to converge if, at a sufficiently high level, every feasible SCC in the menu ultimately results in the same alternative, and hence, further regress has no effective meaning. A menu is said to be convergent if all preference profiles converge under the menu (i.e., infinite regress can “always” be resolved). First, we characterize the convergent menus under a special case. Then, we prove two general possibility theorems: (1) there exists a menu of SCCs that is strongly convergent (i.e., the outcome is uniquely determined); (2) any set of scoring rules can be extended to a superset that is asymptotically convergent for a large society (i.e., the probability of a convergent profile occurring goes to one as the population goes to infinity). Therefore, such a large society can “almost always” resolve the infinite regress by adding multiple SCCs. These theorems are expected to build new ground for SCCs in a distinct way from the axiomatic characterizations of standard social choice theory.

The mental model theory (MMT) provides a unified account of causal representation and inference. The theory claims that a causal assertion “A causes B” has a deterministic meaning that refers to three temporally ordered possibilities: A and B, not A and B, not A and not B. Furthermore, MMT proposes that causal relations depend only on these possibilities, and not on causal powers or mechanisms. In this paper, the MMT account of causation is critiqued by arguing that mental models alone are not sufficient to define the meaning of causal relations, and that if MMT adhered to its own principles, then its account of causation would fall into an infinite regress.

A prominent Thomistic cosmological argument maintains that an infinite regress of causes, which exhibits a certain pattern of ontological dependence among its members, would be vicious and so must terminate in a first member. Interestingly, Jonathan Schaffer offers a similar argument in the contemporary grounding literature for the view called metaphysical foundationalism. I consider the striking similarities between both arguments and conclude that both are unsuccessful for the same reason. I argue this negative result gives us indirect reason to consider metaphysical infinitism as a genuine possibility, the view that chains of ontological dependence or ground can descend indefinitely.

According to Fine's (Modality and tense: philosophical papers. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 261-320, 2005) famous take on the infamous McTaggartian paradox, realism about tensed facts is incompatible with the joint acceptence of three very general and seemingly plausible theses about reality. However, Correia and Rosenkranz (As time goes by: eternal facts in an ageing universe. Mentis, Paderborn, 2011) have recently objected that Fine's argument depends on a crucial assumption about the nature of tensed facts; once that assumption is given up, they claim, realists can endorse the theses in question without further ado. They also argue that their novel version of tense realism, called dynamic absolutism, is to be preferred over its rivals. I argue in this paper that dynamic absolutism does not constitute a genuine alternative for realists about tense.