Perfect‐Recall and Bootstrapping Reasoning

Bootstrapping is a suspicious form of reasoning that seems to allow agents to gain knowledge about the reliability of their sources of information ‘from thin air’, without gathering independent evidence about those sources. The bootstrapping problem is the problem of explaining what is wrong with bootstrapping reasoning. I identify one defect in bootstrapping reasoning by making explicit an implicit dynamic assumption which is made in such reasoning, involving the perfect-recall principle. The defect stems from a fallacious reasoning pattern that arises by misapplication of perfect-recall. I argue that understanding this defect can explain away some aspects of bootstrapping reasoning.