Modal Empiricism in philosophy of science proposes to understand the possibility of modal knowledge from experience by replacing talk of possible worlds with talk of possible situations, which are coarse-grained, bounded and relative to background conditions. This allows for an induction towards objective necessity, assuming that actual situations are representative of possible ones. The main limitation of this epistemology is that it does not account for probabilistic knowledge. In this paper, we propose to extend Modal Empiricism to the probabilistic case, thus providing an inductivist epistemology for probabilistic knowledge. The key idea is that extreme probabilities, close to 1 and 0, serve as proxies for testing mild probabilities, using a principle of model combination.

科学哲学中的模态经验主义提出，通过用可能的情况代替对可能世界的讨论来理解模态知识的可能性，这些情况是粗粒度的、有界的和相对于背景条件的。这允许对客观必要性的归纳，假设实际情况代表了可能的情况。这种认识论的主要局限性是它没有解释概率知识。在本文中，我们建议将模态经验主义扩展到概率情况，从而为概率知识提供归纳主义认识论。关键思想是，接近 1 和 0 的极端概率使用模型组合原则作为测试轻度概率的代理。