Module III LOGIC

The Problem of Induction

From observations we made to expectations or predictions about observations, we have not yet
made. To general claims that go beyond the observed. For example, the observation that food
and nourishment. The next food that we eat will also be nourishing. Inductive inferences. From
known to not yet known and general claims.

The problem of induction: David Hume. He rejects induction. For Hume, the problem remains of
how to explain why we form any conclusions that go beyond the past instances of which we
have had experience (T. 1.3.6.10). Hume stresses that he is not disputing that we do draw such
inferences. The challenge, as he sees it, is to understand the “foundation” of the inference—the
“logic” or “process of argument” that it is based upon (E. 4.2.21).

Hume’s Problem

Hume argues that we cannot make a causal inference by purely a priori means (E. 4.1.7).
Rather, he claims, it is based on experience, and specifically experience of constant
conjunction. We infer that the gunpowder will explode on the basis of past experience of an
association between gunpowder and explosions.

Hume wants to know more about the basis for this kind of inference. If such an inference is
made by a “chain of reasoning” (E. 4.2.16), he says, he would like to know what that reasoning
is. In general, he claims that the inferences depend on a transition of the form:

I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect, and I foresee,
that other objects, which are, in appearance, similar, will be attended with similar effects. (E.
4.2.16)

In the Treatise, Hume says that if Reason determin’d us, it would proceed upon that principle
that instances, of which we have had no experience, must resemble those, of which we have
had experience, and that the course of nature continues always uniformly the same. (T. 1.3.6.4)

Hume says that all reasonings may be divided into two kinds, namely, demonstrative reasoning,
or that concerning relations of ideas, and moral reasoning, or that concerning matter of fact and
existence. (E. 4.2.18) It is possible, he says, to clearly and distinctly conceive of a situation
where the unobserved case does not follow the regularity so far observed (E. 4.2.18, T.
1.3.6.5/89).

Second, Hume argues that the reasoning also cannot be “such as regard matter of fact and real
existence”. He also calls this “probable” reasoning. All such reasoning, he claims, “proceed
upon the supposition, that the future will be conformable to the past”, in other words on the
Uniformity Principle (E. 4.2.19).
In the Treatise version, Hume concludes:

Thus, not only our reason fails us in the discovery of the ultimate connexion of causes and
effects, but even after experience has inform’d us of their constant conjunction, ’tis impossible
for us to satisfy ourselves by our reason, why we shou’d extend that experience beyond those
particular instances, which have fallen under our observation. (T. 1.3.6.11/91–2)

The conclusion then is that our tendency to project past regularities into the future is not
underpinned by reason. The problem of induction is to find a way to avoid this conclusion,
despite Hume’s argument.

After presenting the problem, Hume does present his own “solution” to the doubts he has raised
(E. 5, T. 1.3.7–16). This consists of an explanation of what the inductive inferences are driven
by, if not reason. In the Treatise Hume raises the problem of induction in an explicitly contrastive
way. He asks whether the transition involved in the inference is produced by means of the
understanding or imagination; whether we are determin’d by reason to make the transition, or by
a certain association and relation of perceptions? (T. 1.3.6.4)

And he goes on to summarize the conclusion by saying:

When the mind, therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief
of another, it is not determin’d by reason, but by certain principles, which associate together the
ideas of these objects, and unite them in the imagination. (T. 1.3.6.12)

Thus, it is the imagination which is taken to be responsible for underpinning the inductive
inference, rather than reason.

In the Enquiry, Hume suggests that the step taken by the mind, which is not supported by any
argument, or process of the understanding ... must be induced by some other principle of equal
weight and authority. (E. 5.1.2)

That principle is “custom” or “habit”. The idea is that if one has seen similar objects or events
constantly conjoined, then the mind is inclined to expect a similar regularity to hold in the future.
The tendency or “propensity” to draw such inferences, is the effect of custom:

... having found, in many instances, that any two kinds of objects, flame and heat, snow and
cold, have always been conjoined together; if flame or snow be presented anew to the senses,
the mind is carried by custom to expect heat or cold, and to believe, that such a quality does
exist and will discover itself upon a nearer approach. This belief is the necessary result of
placing the mind in such circumstances. It is an operation of the soul, when we are so situated,
as unavoidable as to feel the passion of love, when we receive benefits; or hatred, when we
meet with injuries. All these operations are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or
process of the thought and understanding is able, either to produce, or to prevent. (E. 5.1.8)
Hume argues that the fact that these inferences do follow the course of nature is a kind of
“pre-established harmony” (E. 5.2.21). It is a kind of natural instinct, which may in fact be more
effective in making us successful in the world, than if we relied on reason to make these
inferences.

Synthetic a priori

As we have seen in section 1, Hume takes demonstrative arguments to have conclusions which
are “relations of ideas”, whereas “probable” or “moral” arguments have conclusions which are
“matters of fact”. Hume’s distinction between “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact” anticipates
the distinction drawn by Kant between “analytic” and “synthetic” propositions (Kant 1781). A
classic example of an analytic proposition is “Bachelors are unmarried men”, and a synthetic
proposition is “My bike tyre is flat”. For Hume, demonstrative arguments, which are based on a
priori reasoning, can establish only relations of ideas, or analytic propositions. The association
between a prioricity and analyticity underpins premise P3, which states that a demonstrative
argument establishes a conclusion whose negation is a contradiction.

One possible response to Hume’s problem is to deny premise P3, by allowing the possibility that
a priori reasoning could give rise to synthetic propositions. Kant famously argued in response to
Hume that such synthetic a priori knowledge is possible (Kant 1781, 1783). He does this by a
kind of reversal of the empiricist programme espoused by Hume. Whereas Hume tried to
understand how the concept of a causal or necessary connection could be based on
experience, Kant argued instead that experience only comes about through the concepts or
“categories” of the understanding. On his view, one can gain a priori knowledge of these
concepts, including the concept of causation, by a transcendental argument concerning the
necessary preconditions of experience. A more detailed account of Kant’s response to Hume
can be found in de Pierris and Friedman 2013.

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CHAPTER ON INDUCTION by Bertrand Russell, Problems of

Philosophy

In almost all our previous discussions we have been concerned in the attempt to get clear as to
our data in the way of knowledge of existence. What things are there in the universe whose
existence is known to us owing to our being acquainted with them? So far, our answer has been
that we are acquainted with our sense-data, and, probably, with ourselves. These we know to
exist. And past sense-data which are remembered are known to have existed in the past. This
knowledge supplies our data.

But if we are to be able to draw inferences from these data—if we are to know of the existence
of matter, of other people, of the past before our individual memory begins, or of the future, we
must know general principles of some kind by means of which such inferences can be drawn. It
must be known to us that the existence of some one sort of thing, A, is a sign of the existence of
some other sort of thing, B, either at the same time as A or at some earlier or later time, as, for
example, thunder is a sign of the earlier existence of lightning. If this were not known to us, we
could never extend our knowledge beyond the sphere of our private experience; and this
sphere, as we have seen, is exceedingly limited. The question we have now to consider is
whether such an extension is possible, and if so, how it is effected.

Let us take as an illustration a matter about which none of us, in fact, feel the slightest doubt.
We are all convinced that the sun will rise to-morrow. Why? Is this belief a mere blind outcome
of past experience, or can it be justified as a reasonable belief? It is not easy to find a test by
which to judge whether a belief of this kind is reasonable or not, but we can at least ascertain
what sort of general beliefs would suffice, if true, to justify the judgement that the sun will rise
to-morrow, and the many other similar judgements upon which our actions are based.

It is obvious that if we are asked why we believe that the sun will rise to-morrow, we shall
naturally answer 'Because it always has risen every day'. We have a firm belief that it will rise in
the future, because it has risen in the past. If we are challenged as to why we believe that it will
continue to rise as heretofore, we may appeal to the laws of motion: the earth, we shall say, is a
freely rotating body, and such bodies do not cease to rotate unless something interferes from
outside, and there is nothing outside to interfere with the earth between now and to-morrow. Of
course it might be doubted whether we are quite certain that there is nothing outside to interfere,
but this is not the interesting doubt. The interesting doubt is as to whether the laws of motion will
remain in operation until to-morrow. If this doubt is raised, we find ourselves in the same
position as when the doubt about the sunrise was first raised.

The only reason for believing that the laws of motion will remain in operation is that they have
operated hitherto, so far as our knowledge of the past enables us to judge. It is true that we
have a greater body of evidence from the past in favour of the laws of motion than we have in
favour of the sunrise, because the sunrise is merely a particular case of fulfilment of the laws of
motion, and there are countless other particular cases. But the real question is: Do any number
of cases of a law being fulfilled in the past afford evidence that it will be fulfilled in the future? If
not, it becomes plain that we have no ground whatever for expecting the sun to rise to-morrow,
or for expecting the bread we shall eat at our next meal not to poison us, or for any of the other
scarcely conscious expectations that control our daily lives. It is to be observed that all such
expectations are only probable; thus we have not to seek for a proof that they must be fulfilled,
but only for some reason in favour of the view that they are likely to be fulfilled.

Now in dealing with this question we must, to begin with, make an important distinction, without
which we should soon become involved in hopeless confusions. Experience has shown us that,
hitherto, the frequent repetition of some uniform succession or coexistence has been a cause of
our expecting the same succession or coexistence on the next occasion. Food that has a
certain appearance generally has a certain taste, and it is a severe shock to our expectations
when the familiar appearance is found to be associated with an unusual taste. Things which we
see become associated, by habit, with certain tactile sensations which we expect if we touch
them; one of the horrors of a ghost (in many ghost-stories) is that it fails to give us any
sensations of touch. Uneducated people who go abroad for the first time are so surprised as to
be incredulous when they find their native language not understood.

And this kind of association is not confined to men; in animals also it is very strong. A horse
which has been often driven along a certain road resists the attempt to drive him in a different
direction. Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We
know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man
who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing
that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

But in spite of the misleadingness of such expectations, they nevertheless exist. The mere fact
that something has happened a certain number of times causes animals and men to expect that
it will happen again. Thus our instincts certainly cause us to believe that the sun will rise
to-morrow, but we may be in no better a position than the chicken which unexpectedly has its
neck wrung. We have therefore to distinguish the fact that past uniformities cause expectations
as to the future, from the question whether there is any reasonable ground for giving weight to
such expectations after the question of their validity has been raised.

The problem we have to discuss is whether there is any reason for believing in what is called
'the uniformity of nature'. The belief in the uniformity of nature is the belief that everything that
has happened or will happen is an instance of some general law to which there are no
exceptions. The crude expectations which we have been considering are all subject to
exceptions, and therefore liable to disappoint those who entertain them. But science habitually
assumes, at least as a working hypothesis, that general rules which have exceptions can be
replaced by general rules which have no exceptions. 'Unsupported bodies in air fall' is a general
rule to which balloons and aeroplanes are exceptions. But the laws of motion and the law of
gravitation, which account for the fact that most bodies fall, also account for the fact that
balloons and aeroplanes can rise; thus the laws of motion and the law of gravitation are not
subject to these exceptions.

The belief that the sun will rise to-morrow might be falsified if the earth came suddenly into
contact with a large body which destroyed its rotation; but the laws of motion and the law of
gravitation would not be infringed by such an event. The business of science is to find
uniformities, such as the laws of motion and the law of gravitation, to which, so far as our
experience extends, there are no exceptions. In this search science has been remarkably
successful, and it may be conceded that such uniformities have held hitherto. This brings us
back to the question: Have we any reason, assuming that they have always held in the past, to
suppose that they will hold in the future?

It has been argued that we have reason to know that the future will resemble the past, because
what was the future has constantly become the past, and has always been found to resemble
the past, so that we really have experience of the future, namely of times which were formerly
future, which we may call past futures. But such an argument really begs the very question at
issue. We have experience of past futures, but not of future futures, and the question is: Will
future futures resemble past futures? This question is not to be answered by an argument which
starts from past futures alone. We have therefore still to seek for some principle which shall
enable us to know that the future will follow the same laws as the past.

The reference to the future in this question is not essential. The same question arises when we
apply the laws that work in our experience to past things of which we have no experience—as,
for example, in geology, or in theories as to the origin of the Solar System. The question we
really have to ask is: 'When two things have been found to be often associated, and no instance
is known of the one occurring without the other, does the occurrence of one of the two, in a
fresh instance, give any good ground for expecting the other?' On our answer to this question
must depend the validity of the whole of our expectations as to the future, the whole of the
results obtained by induction, and in fact practically all the beliefs upon which our daily life is
based.

It must be conceded, to begin with, that the fact that two things have been found often together
and never apart does not, by itself, suffice to prove demonstratively that they will be found
together in the next case we examine. The most we can hope is that the oftener things are
found together, the more probable it becomes that they will be found together another time, and
that, if they have been found together often enough, the probability will amount almost to
certainty. It can never quite reach certainty, because we know that in spite of frequent repetitions
there sometimes is a failure at the last, as in the case of the chicken whose neck is wrung. Thus
probability is all we ought to seek.

It might be urged, as against the view we are advocating, that we know all natural phenomena
to be subject to the reign of law, and that sometimes, on the basis of observation, we can see
that only one law can possibly fit the facts of the case. Now to this view there are two answers.
The first is that, even if some law which has no exceptions applies to our case, we can never, in
practice, be sure that we have discovered that law and not one to which there are exceptions.
The second is that the reign of law would seem to be itself only probable, and that our belief that
it will hold in the future, or in unexamined cases in the past, is itself based upon the very
principle we are examining.

The principle we are examining may be called the principle of induction, and its two parts may
be stated as follows:

(a) When a thing of a certain sort A has been found to be associated with a thing of a certain
other sort B, and has never been found dissociated from a thing of the sort B, the greater the
number of cases in which A and B have been associated, the greater is the probability that they
will be associated in a fresh case in which one of them is known to be present;

(b) Under the same circumstances, a sufficient number of cases of association will make the
probability of a fresh association nearly a certainty, and will make it approach certainty without
limit.
As just stated, the principle applies only to the verification of our expectation in a single fresh
instance. But we want also to know that there is a probability in favour of the general law that
things of the sort A are always associated with things of the sort B, provided a sufficient number
of cases of association are known, and no cases of failure of association are known. The
probability of the general law is obviously less than the probability of the particular case, since if
the general law is true, the particular case must also be true, whereas the particular case may
be true without the general law being true. Nevertheless the probability of the general law is
increased by repetitions, just as the probability of the particular case is. We may therefore
repeat the two parts of our principle as regards the general law, thus:

(a) The greater the number of cases in which a thing of the sort A has been found associated
with a thing of the sort B, the more probable it is (if no cases of failure of association are known)
that A is always associated with B;

(b) Under the same circumstances, a sufficient number of cases of the association of A with B
will make it nearly certain that A is always associated with B, and will make this general law
approach certainty without limit.

It should be noted that probability is always relative to certain data. In our case, the data are
merely the known cases of coexistence of A and B. There may be other data, which might be
taken into account, which would gravely alter the probability. For example, a man who had seen
a great many white swans might argue, by our principle, that on the data it was probable that all
swans were white, and this might be a perfectly sound argument. The argument is not disproved
by the fact that some swans are black, because a thing may very well happen in spite of the fact
that some data render it improbable. In the case of the swans, a man might know that colour is
a very variable characteristic in many species of animals, and that, therefore, an induction as to
colour is peculiarly liable to error. But this knowledge would be a fresh datum, by no means
proving that the probability relatively to our previous data had been wrongly estimated. The fact,
therefore, that things often fail to fulfil our expectations is no evidence that our expectations will
not probably be fulfilled in a given case or a given class of cases. Thus our inductive principle is
at any rate not capable of being disproved by an appeal to experience.

The inductive principle, however, is equally incapable of being proved by an appeal to

experience. Experience might conceivably confirm the inductive principle as regards the cases
that have been already examined; but as regards unexamined cases, it is the inductive principle
alone that can justify any inference from what has been examined to what has not been
examined. All arguments which, on the basis of experience, argue as to the future or the
unexperienced parts of the past or present, assume the inductive principle; hence we can never
use experience to prove the inductive principle without begging the question. Thus we must
either accept the inductive principle on the ground of its intrinsic evidence, or forgo all
justification of our expectations about the future. If the principle is unsound, we have no reason
to expect the sun to rise to-morrow, to expect bread to be more nourishing than a stone, or to
expect that if we throw ourselves off the roof we shall fall. When we see what looks like our best
friend approaching us, we shall have no reason to suppose that his body is not inhabited by the
mind of our worst enemy or of some total stranger. All our conduct is based upon associations
which have worked in the past, and which we therefore regard as likely to work in the future;
and this likelihood is dependent for its validity upon the inductive principle.

The general principles of science, such as the belief in the reign of law, and the belief that every
event must have a cause, are as completely dependent upon the inductive principle as are the
beliefs of daily life. All such general principles are believed because mankind have found
innumerable instances of their truth and no instances of their falsehood. But this affords no
evidence for their truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed.

Thus all knowledge which, on a basis of experience tells us something about what is not
experienced, is based upon a belief which experience can neither confirm nor confute, yet
which, at least in its more concrete applications, appears to be as firmly rooted in us as many of
the facts of experience. The existence and justification of such beliefs—for the inductive
principle, as we shall see, is not the only example—raises some of the most difficult and most
debated problems of philosophy.