A Pragmatist re-reading of Peter Klein's infinitism

Abstract

Pyrrhonian skepticism, specifically that which appeals to the regress argument, claims that we cannot know that something is the case or that something is not the case, because we will always lack reasons that guarantee knowledge. This imposes on contemporary epistemology the task of developing a theoretical proposal that disables the skeptical thesis and offers an adequate answer to the puzzle of Pyrrhonian skepticism. In contemporary epistemology, we can mention at least three possible paths: foundationalism (and its various strands), coherentism (and its various strands) and the infinitism proposed by Peter Klein. Infinitism, as Peter Klein presents it, has some weaknesses and, for this very reason, continues to be the target of strong criticism. We believe that the pragmatic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce can serve as theoretical inspiration for a possible reinterpretation of Infinitism. The answers to save epistemology from skeptical attacks, whether by challenging the fragile criteria of justification or those provided by the limited solutions of naturalism and fallibilism, as well as infinitism, can, in our view, be glimpsed on the horizon of a pragmatic analysis of research, since the basis of research (empirical or not) is pragmatically determined, according to Peirce, in each investigation, in each research program or research tradition. With this, we propose that an infinitist theory inspired by Peirce's pragmatism can offer us an adequate alternative to the skepticism of epistemic regress.