The Humean Problem of Induction and Peter F. Strawson

In keeping with my desire to post on this blog more frequently than I actually do, I have decided to link to a paper that I wrote for school on David Hume's problem of induction and Peter F. Strawson's response. I am not all that proud of the paper, as I have written better ones, but it does the job. Here is the link for direct access, and below follows a summary for those unfamiliar with anything I have just mentioned: http://www.freegoodnews.com/logos/humeandstrawson.htm

To put it briefly, the Humean problem of induction is essentially a philosophical observation that Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote about in the 18th century. Hume is famous for being a skeptic, and in this problem he creates for inductive reasoning he is true to that title. Basically what Hume does is ask our reason for thinking that the future will be like the past. In so doing his point is, ultimately, to show that we have no reason for believing that the future will be like the past. The way he accomplishes this task is to examine the potential arguments we could give for such a belief - a deductive one and an inductive one - and to rule both out.

Against a deductive argument that the future will resemble the past, Hume says that such a proposition as "the future will resemble the past" is not entailed by any known propositions that we have, therefore we cannot validily deduce it as true. Hence we must turn to induction to justify this belief, yet here we run into a problem. If we try to argue to the idea that the future will probably resemble the past, what shall we admit as evidence for this being true? One good candidate (and perhaps the only) is past experience. Thus, from past experience we observe a regularity of nature, therefore we can expect that it will continue on into the future. What Hume shows is that this statement, "The past has been regular" does not entail the statement we wish to arrive at, specifically, "The future will be like the past." Hence, we must find some intervening proposition that connects these two, otherwise we cannot reasonably hold the second statement to be true. Hume posits - or rather, other philosophers have taken Hume to posit - that we need something like a principle of the uniformity of nature that we can use as an intermediate premise that will take us from "the past has been regular" to "nature is uniform" and all the way to "therefore, the future will be like the past." The problem is that such a principle is not a necessary truth - i.e. it is possible that it is false - and we cannot justify it through induction - i.e. by observing what the past is like and inferring that the future will be similar.

Thus, we can see that there is a problem. To inductively conclude that the future will be like the past is ciricular because it assumes that the past gives us evidence of what the future will be like without explaining how we can know this. And, as well any attempts to deductively justify a belief in the uniformity of nature will immediately be met with shouts of illegitimacy because none of our justified beliefs entail that the future will be like the past. Hence, if we believe that the future will resemble the past, we seem to do so without having a reason for this belief.

So what can we say in response? You'll just have to read the paper...