David Hume (1711-1776) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) disturbed the complacency of common sense by exposing the dubious rationality of one of our most fundamental propensities, to expect the future to exhibit the same patterns that we have observed in the past. They showed that inductive inference from the past to the future rests on an assumption that contradicts another firm belief of common sense. We assume that science can always find a natural explanation for the ways in which the world naturally behaves. This contradicts the belief that the laws of nature form a pyramidal hierarchy with one or a few fundamental, ultimate laws at the top. The ultimate laws explain the subordinate laws, but no scientific explanation remains for the ultimate laws. There is no scientific reason why the world has conformed its behaviour to those laws, and therefore we have no scientific reason to expect that it will continue to do so. The philosophical problem of induction is not a mere intellectual puzzle or pseudo-problem that arises from misunderstanding the nature of language or from using ordinary words with non-standard senses. It arises from a recognition that the common sense criteria that we employ in ordinary life for strong inductive inferences cannot apply at the level of the ultimate laws of nature. At that level we can have no inductive grounds for expecting that the world will continue to behave as it has in the past.

About the Author

John Ibberson B.A., M.A. (Calgary), D.Phil. (Oxford) is the author of The Language of Decision: An Essay in Prescriptivist Ethical Theory (Macmillan, 1986) and Autonomous Reason: A Defense of Rationality Against Naturalistic Materialism (Studium Generale, 2017). He taught philosophy at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, British Columbia from 1989 until 2013. He is now an independent scholar residing in Kelowna, BC.

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