User:Dominic Mayers/sandbox/problem of induction
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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 that goes beyond a mere collection of observations[1], 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 (e.g., the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and, therefore, all swans are white", before the discovery of black swans) or
- Presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past, as it is generally accepted to be the case in specific situations where laws of physics hold. Hume called this the principle of uniformity of nature.[2]
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The traditional inductivist view is that all claimed empirical laws, either in everyday life or through the scientific method, can be justified through some form of reasoning. The problem is that many philosophers tried to find such a justification but their proposals were not accepted by others. Identifying the inductivist view as the scientific view, C. D. Broad once said that "induction is the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy". In contrast, Karl Popper's critical rationalism claimed that inductive justifications are never used in science and proposed instead that science is based on the procedure of conjecturing hypotheses, deductively calculating consequences, and then empirically attempting to falsify them.
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.