Peirce, Pedigree, Probability

An aspect of Peirce’s thought that might still be underappreciated is his resistance to what Levi calls pedigree epistemology, i.e., to the idea that a central focus in epistemology should be the justification of current beliefs. Somewhat more widely appreciated is his rejection of the subjective view of probabil-ity. We argue that Peirce’s criticisms of sub-jectivism, to the extent that they grant that such a conception of probability is viable at all, revert back to pedigree epistemology. A thoroughgoing rejection of pedigree in the context of probabilistic epistemology, how-ever, does challenge prominent subjectivist responses to the problem of the priors.