Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Submit

Articles

Induction: The Problem Solved

In our second contribution on the problem of induction, John Shand argues that there is no problem, because there is no such thing as an inductive argument.

When people talk about the problem of induction, they mean the problem of justifying the rationality of inductive arguments. My eliminative answer is to argue that there is no problem of justifying inductive arguments because there is no such thing as an inductive argument. Socalled inductive arguments as such have no logical force. Nevertheless I will contend that there is such a thing as an inductive procedure whose statements are true and track facts in the world; but such procedures aren’t arguments because the statements involved aren’t linked by deductive relations.

What I will say in fact applies to any less-than-deductive putative argument.

…