The Challenging Hume's Problem Of Induction

     It is Cleanthes who gets the ball rolling in Part II of Hume by laying out his “argument from design.” Cleanthes believes that there is ample evidence in the nature that surrounds us to draw conclusions

Hume states that hoe do we know that the laws of nature tomorrow will be the same as the ones today, we only have the past to rely on which doesn’t say much about the future. We cannot prove the laws of nature and their existence.

Induction is a form of reasoning where the premises support the conclusion, but do not confirm that the conclusion is true. To justify induction, we are required to justify that we can infer that experiences we have never experienced will resemble those that we have experienced. Making inductive inferences is necessary for everyday life as well as in science. It is rational to rely on inductive arguments in everyday life for claims such as “the sun will rise tomorrow.” But inductive arguments require that nature is uniform. For example, tomorrow the laws of physics will continue to work the same as how they have in the past, so the world will continue spinning and the sun will rise. This perceived uniformity (the principle of uniformity of nature) allows claims like the one previously outlined to be easily understood. Although inductive arguments are useful, whether or not they can be justified is a topic of debate. In James Van Cleve’s “Reliability, Justification and the Problem of Induction,” he uses an inductive argument to attempt to justify induction. In his justification he claims that his method of argument is not circular. I argue that his reasoning is problematic because an inductive argument is not able to justify induction, mainly because inductive arguments presuppose the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature.

David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion provide conflicting arguments about the nature of the universe, what humans can know about it, and how their knowledge can affect their religious beliefs. The most compelling situation relates to philosophical skepticism and religion; the empiricist character, Cleanthes, strongly defends his position that skepticism is beneficial to religious belief. Under fire from an agnostic skeptic and a rationalist, the empiricist view on skepticism and religion is strongest in it’s defense. This debate is a fundamental part of the study of philosophy: readers must choose their basic understanding of the universe and it’s creator, upon which all other assumptions about the universe will be made.

The reason Goodman has a pressing issue with is, is due to the fact that this is a regularity of everyday life and has not been proven wrong. “An argument that violates a rule is fallacious seven if its conclusion happens to be true. To justify a deductive conclusion therefore requires no knowledge of the facts it pertains to.” (Goodman 63). Goodman here speaks on behalf of how it is impossible to call a statement such as “the sun will rise in the morning” because according to validity it must have a true conclusion with true premises. Yes the sun does come up every morning but there is always the possibility a scientific catastrophe occurs and the sun explodes and causes a supernova it will then contradict the conclusion. So many of the facts we have engraved in our brains do need to be thought through and examined carefully because if it is to be truly valid it can not be proven by just a reoccurring incident that has not been proven wrong. “I think, that lawlike or projectable hypotheses cannot be distinguished on any merely syntactical grounds or even on the ground that these hypotheses are somehow purely general in meaning” (Goodman 83). Consider the evidence that all emeralds examined thus far have been green. This draws us to conclude, by induction that universally all-future emeralds will be green. However, if this conjectures is lawlike or not relies on the predicates used in this

In this paper I discuss both Hume’s and Anscombe’s view on causation. I begin with Hume and his regularity theory; then I move onto Anscombe where I provide a rebuttal of Hume’s regularity theory, and later I explain how Hume would respond to Anscombe’s objection to Hume’s regularity theory.

     Now Hume proposed that all inferences come from custom, not reasoning. Through custom or habits, we have become accustomed to expect an effect to follow a cause. This is not a rational argument. This argument centers on the theory of constant conjunction, which does not fall under either fork of reason. “All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not reasoning.”(57)

René Descartes was a skeptic, and thus he believed that in order for something to be considered a true piece of knowledge, that “knowledge must have a certain stability,” (Cottingham 21). In his work, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes concludes that in order to achieve this stability, he must start at the foundations for all of his opinions and find the basis of doubt in each of them. David Hume, however, holds a different position on skepticism in his work An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, for he criticizes Descartes’ claim because “‘it is impossible,’” (qtd. in Cottingham 35). Both philosophers show distinct reasoning in what skepticism is and how it is useful in finding stability.

David Hume wrote Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1748, right in the middle of the Enlightenment and on the eve of the Industrial and Scientific Revolution. So it only makes sense that some of the ideas and comparisons used are slightly outdated, but science, if anything, helps his argument regarding causality. Hume is ultimately concerned with the origins of causality, how we are able to gain knowledge from causality, and if we can even call the knowledge derived from causality real knowledge. This is essentially the problem of induction, and is a central pillar of Hume's overall philosophy. There are some significant objections to Hume's ideas concerning causality, but they do not hold much clout and are no match for his

David Hume was a British empiricist, meaning he believed all knowledge comes through the senses. He argued against the existence of innate ideas, stating that humans have knowledge only of things which they directly experience. These claims have a major impact on his argument against the existence of miracles, and in this essay I will explain and critically evaluate this argument.

In the selection, ‘Skeptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding’, David Hume poses a problem for knowledge about the world. This question is related to the problem of induction. David Hume was one of the first who decided to analyze this problem. He starts the selection by providing his form of dividing the human knowledge, and later discusses reasoning and its dependence on experience. Hume states that people believe that the future will resemble the past, but we have no evidence to support this belief. In this paper, I will clarify the forms of knowledge and reasoning and examine Hume’s problem of induction, which is a challenge to Justified True Belief account because we lack a justification for our

Most individuals tend to base their understanding of the world solely on what they know; however they acquire this knowledge mostly through experience which can be deemed as problematic by different philosophers. The debate regarding knowledge through experience tends to revolve around philosophers who view experience as a limiting form of knowledge, in contrast to other philosophers who view experience as a stepping stone to acquiring the accuracy and credibility of a particular idea. David Hume and Charles Peirce are two philosophers whose ideas of reasoning fall within this debate. David Hume is a philosopher who believes that individuals naturally reason inductively; which is, using experiences to interpret and predict things. While Charles Peirce is a philosopher who believes that through abductive reasoning, individuals have a better chance of determining if a notion is true or false. Although both inductive reasoning and abductive reasoning stems from the same idea of reasoning through experience, the conclusion from both philosophers are at opposite ends. Where Hume finds inductive reasoning problematic, Peirce presents abduction as a solution. Therefore, this essay will compare the arguments of both philosophers to determine whose perspective is more persuasive and to find out what roles these arguments play in scientific knowledge.

In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume states, “there is not, in any single, particular instance of cause and effect, any thing which can suggest the idea of power or necessary connexion” (Hume, 1993: 41). Hume establishes in section II that all ideas originate from impressions that employ the senses (11). Therefore, in order for there to be an idea of power or “necessary connexion,” there must be impressions of this connection present in single instances of cause and effect; if there are no such impressions, then there cannot be an idea of “necessary connexion” (52). To illustrate his statement, Hume examines four situations:

This essay looks to discuss Wittgenstein’s response to Russell’s worries about inductive reasoning. According to Russell, inductive beliefs cannot be justified, as to justify them we need to know that the past is indicative of the future, which we cannot know since the future has not occurred yet. Thus, he holds that we cannot justify inductive beliefs. First the essay discusses how we ordinarily claim that induction to be unjustified. Conclusions drawn from this are then used by Wittgenstein to alleviate Russell’s problem. The essay then finds that Russell’s problem comes from him confusing the definitions of knowledge and justified beliefs. Finally, the paper looks to see if Wittgenstein’s response was successful and concludes that it is.

While induction is only one of the five parts of the inductivist account of science, it is one of the most important steps. Induction is the process by which scientists make a leap of thought from observation to theory, and if induction has flaws, then the new theory must unquestionably contain flaws. Regardless of these errors, a scientist, according to an inductivist philosopher, will still accept a particular scientific theory if it can be validly induced from factual observation and experiment.