ABSTRACT
The current debate over permissivism versus uniqueness has not led to permissivism being proposed as a solution of the paradox. Nevertheless, according to permissivism a particular pair of the premisses in the Rigorous argument are contraries, the pair that are denied by the Irrelevance strategy, and so permissivism applied to the paradox is an instance of the Irrelevance strategy.
Given the special meaning of uniqueness in the debate over permissivism, all can agree that singleness is a requirement of probability. The question at issue is singleness with respect to what. On Feldman’s formulation of uniqueness it is singleness with respect to evidence. For my purposes I need, and therefore use, a broader account of uniqueness than that in the permissivism debate, namely, unique with respect to possessed epistemic reasons.
In this chapter I argue that epistemic objectivity requires uniqueness. The argument I give is novel and places pressure on permissivism in general whilst also showing that permissivism amounts to the denial of the principle of indifference. The argument shows that permissivism doesn’t solve Bertrand’s paradox and that philosophical theories of epistemic probability that subscribe to both the principle of indifference and epistemic objectivity are committed to uniqueness.
