Problem of induction
Channel: the aleatoric learning channel
Date: 2021-09-04

The problem of induction is the philosophical question of what are the justifications, if any, for any growth of knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense-knowledge that goes beyond a mere collection of observations-highlighting the apparent lack of justification in particular for: Generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class or Presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past. The original source of what is known as the problem today was proposed by David Hume in the mid-18th century, although inductive justifications were already argued against by the Pyrrhonist school of Hellenistic philosophy and the Cārvāka school of ancient Indian philosophy in a way that shed light on the problem of induction. The focus upon the gap between the premises and conclusion present in the above passage appears different from Hume's focus upon the circular reasoning of induction. Although the criterion argument applies to both deduction and induction, Weintraub believes that Sextus's argument "Is precisely the strategy Hume invokes against induction: it cannot be justified, because the purported justification, being inductive, is circular." She concludes that "Hume's most important legacy is the supposition that the justification of induction is not analogous to that of deduction." She ends with a discussion of Hume's implicit sanction of the validity of deduction, which Hume describes as intuitive in a manner analogous to modern foundationalism. Causes of effects cannot be linked through a priori reasoning, but by positing a "Necessary connection" that depends on the "Uniformity of nature." Hume situates his introduction to the problem of induction in A Treatise of Human Nature within his larger discussion on the nature of causes and effects. Hume offers no solution to the problem of induction himself. Nelson Goodman's Fact, Fiction, and Forecast presented a different description of the problem of induction in the chapter entitled "The New Riddle of Induction". The "New" problem of induction is, since all emeralds we have ever seen are both green and grue, why do we suppose that after time t we will find green but not grue emeralds? The problem here raised is that two different inductions will be true and false under the same conditions. David Stove's argument for induction, based on the statistical syllogism, was presented in the Rationality of Induction and was developed from an argument put forward by one of Stove's heroes, the late Donald Cary Williams in his book The Ground of Induction. According to Popper, the problem of induction as usually conceived is asking the wrong question: it is asking how to justify theories given they cannot be justified by induction.