ABSTRACT
In this chapter I look at Marinoff’s attempted solution, a solution that was historically and for a long time the prime contender for solving the paradox using the Distinction strategy. I show that Marinoff falls into what I call van Fraassen’s trap. In this case, to fall into the trap is to claim that the ignorance of which random process is used to pick a chord justifies distinguishing distinct ways of doing so, each of which produces consistent probabilities. But the principle is supposed to deal with ignorance and replacing Bertrand’s question with others specifying random processes is not saving the principle but covertly abandoning it. The penultimate section shows that what I call meta-indifference, primarily a resource for the Well-posing strategy, cannot avoid the trap. Falling into van Fraassen’s trap is not specific to Marinoff’s solution but applies to the Distinction strategy as such, and in the final section I identify the same error in other literature pursuing this strategy.
