ABSTRACT
Bertrand does not give an argument from his paradox to the falsity of the principle of indifference and it is widely assumed that the falsity follows immediately. There is, however, a frailty of validity in that assumption, that the paradox may refute Bertrand’s question rather than the principle. I turn to identifying how the paradox threatens the principle rather than the question and give an explicit argument from the paradox to the falsity of the principle. I then distinguish the four kinds of strategies for solving the paradox that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive: Irrelevance, Well-posing, Distinction and Entirely Unanswerable. For each strategy I give a characteristic diagnosis and a response to the explicit argument in terms of premisses rejected. I am now able to make sense of Bertrand’s own treatment as an instance of the Entirely Unanswerable strategy and I mention the textual evidence that he intended it in this way. His is the only instance of this strategy in the literature, so the rest of the book is concerned with instances of the other three strategies.
