Problem of induction

[2] The traditional inductivist view is that all claimed empirical laws, either in everyday life or through the scientific method, can be justified through some form of reasoning.In fact, David Hume even argued that we cannot claim it is "more probable", since this still requires the assumption that the past predicts the future.Bertrand Russell illustrated this point in The Problems of Philosophy: Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them.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.The works of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus contain the oldest surviving questioning of the validity of inductive reasoning.The Cārvāka, a materialist and skeptic school of Indian philosophy, used the problem of induction to point out the flaws in using inference as a way to gain valid knowledge.[7][8] The 9th century Indian skeptic, Jayarasi Bhatta, also made an attack on inference, along with all means of knowledge, and showed by a type of reductio argument that there was no way to conclude universal relations from the observation of particular instances.'"[12] Some 17th-century Jesuits argued that although God could create the end of the world at any moment, it was necessarily a rare event and hence our confidence that it would not happen very soon was largely justified.For Hume, establishing the link between causes and effects relies not on reasoning alone, but the observation of "constant conjunction" throughout one's sensory experience.He does not deny future uses of induction, but shows that it is distinct from deductive reasoning, helps to ground causation, and wants to inquire more deeply into its validity.For example, one might argue that it is valid to use inductive inference in the future because this type of reasoning has yielded accurate results in the past.He argues that the problem of induction only arises if we deny the possibility of a reason for the predicate, located in the enduring nature of something.This intuition was taken into account by Keith Campbell by considering that, to be built, a concept must be reapplied, which demands a certain continuity in its object of application and consequently some openness to induction.Consequently – contra Hume – some form of principle of homogeneity (causal or structural) between future and past must be warranted, which would make some inductive procedure always possible.[29] The main role of observations and experiments in science, he argued, is in attempts to criticize and refute existing theories.[clarification needed][32] Popper held that seeking for theories with a high probability of being true was a false goal that is in conflict with the search for knowledge.Wesley C. Salmon criticizes Popper on the grounds that predictions need to be made both for practical purposes and in order to test theories.Popperians would wish to choose well-corroborated theories, in their sense of corroboration, but face a dilemma: either they are making the essentially inductive claim that a theory's having survived criticism in the past means it will be a reliable predictor in the future; or Popperian corroboration is no indicator of predictive power at all, so there is no rational motivation for their preferred selection principle.So it is rational to choose the well-corroborated theory: It may not be more likely to be true, but if it is actually false, it is easier to get rid of when confronted with the conflicting evidence that will eventually turn up.