A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories)

by Nigel Warburton

Induction is very different from this. Induction usually involves arguing from a selection of observations to a general conclusion. If you notice that it rained every Tuesday for four consecutive weeks, you might generalize from this that it always rains on Tuesdays. That would be a case of Induction. It would only take one dry Tuesday to undermine the claim that it always rains on Tuesdays. Four consecutive wet Tuesdays is a small sample of all the possible Tuesdays. But even if you make numerous observations, as with the white swans, you can still be thwarted by the existence of a single case that doesn't fit your generalization: one dry Tuesday or one non-white swan, for example. And that is the Problem of Induction, the problem of justifying relying on the method of induction when it seems so unreliable. How do you know that the next glass of water you drink won't poison you? Answer: all the glasses of water you've drunk in the past were fine. So you assume that this one will be. We use this kind of reasoning all the time. Yet it seems that we aren't completely justified in putting such faith in it. We assume patterns in nature that may or may not really be there. If you think that science progresses by induction, as many philosophers have done, then you have to face the Problem of Induction. How can science be based on such an unreliable style of reasoning? Popper's view of how science develops neatly avoids this problem. That's because, according to him, science does...