- David Hume: Scottish philosopher who is most closely associated with the problem of induction.
- Black Swan.
- Karl Popper: Falibilist who believed that induction is a myth.
- David Deutsch: Quantum physicist and strong proponent of Popper's philosophy.
- The problem of induction concerns how we know that the things we hold to be true are actually true.
- The problem of induction is most closely associated with the philosopher David Hume.
- David Hume believed there that attempts to justify inductive reasoning fail due to circular reasoning.
- Hume divided our knowledge into "matters of fact" and "relations of ideas".
- Relations of ideas are things we can know by pure thought alone.
¶ Turkeys and the Problem of Induction
- Bertrand Russel explained the problem of induction using a story about turkeys.
- Imagine you are a turkey living on a farm. Every morning without fail, the farmer brings food for you and your turkey friends. After this phenomenon repeats for days and months, you announce that you have discovered a new general law of nature - that every day at 11 am a farmer will come to bring you food. But at 11am on Thanksgiving Day, the farmer does not bring you food, instead he takes you and the rest of the Turkeys to be slaughtered. Bertrand Russel's turkey story shows that any knowledge we hold that we justify on the basis of something always acting in a certain way in the past could turn out to be false in the future. It is not necessarily the case that things will behave in the future as they did in the past. ^TurkeyStory
- Induction is a myth.
- Primary role of experience in science is to criticize and refute existing theories.
- Knowledge grows through repeated cycles of conjecture and refutation where conjectures are bold guesses and refutations are falsifications of those guesses.