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ABSTRACT
Humean metaphysical views have often been criticised for leading to inductive scepticism. If there is no glue holding the world together, as the Humean believes, then there seems to be no basis on which to infer from past to future. However, Humeans have typically been unconcerned. After all, they say, everyone has a problem with induction. But if we look at the connection between induction and explanation, we can develop the problem of induction in a way that hits the Humean, but not the anti-Humean. The Humean faces an ‘internal’ problem with induction: scepticism about important inductive inferences naturally flows from their position in a way that it doesn’t for the anti-Humean. This is a major problem, perhaps a fatal one, for the Humean.
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Notes
1 The arguments that I discuss in this paper are based on explanatory considerations. Sometimes, the argument that Humeanism leads to inductive scepticism is developed differently, using probabilistic considerations (e.g. Foster [Citation1982]). The idea is that most of the possible Humean mosaics consistent with our past evidence are ones where the future is chaotic, rather than continuing to be regular. So, the Humean should not expect the regularities of the past to continue. I’m not focusing on that version of the argument because I think it’s fairly easy for the Humean to respond that the argument hits anti-Humeans, too: most possible anti-Humean laws lead to chaotic-looking mosaics in the future, too (although see Hildebrand [Citation2016] for disagreement). There’s more to say here, but I’m leaving aside this probabilistic version of the argument.
2 Notice that I’m not claiming that the Screen is closely analogous to the Humean mosaic (even though Strawson does, at times, claim this). One major difference is that the output of the screen is generated by a chancy process, while that’s not the case for the Humean mosaic. Rather, I’m simply using the case to help to motivate the link between explanation and induction.
3 See http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations for these, and many other, spurious correlations.
4 I’m not totally confident of this interpretation of Beebee, but it doesn’t really matter for our purposes. Perhaps the view I discuss was actually Beebee’s view, or perhaps it is just an interesting view in the spirit of her claims.
5 See Lewis [Citation1986: 42–3] and many refinements of this idea: e.g. Loewer [Citation1996], Hall [Citation2010], Hicks [Citation2018], Dorst [Citation2019], and Jaag and Loew [Citation2020].
6 Thanks to a reviewer for this point.
7 Thanks to a reviewer for discussion of this point.
8 Thanks to a reviewer for suggesting formulations of some of these premises.
9 We have to be a little careful here, because there are two ways of reading this ‘even if’ conditional. Take the anaemia case again. We think that the correlation between the gene and anaemia is a coincidence. It seems natural, then, to say that, if the correlation extended outside the sample, this would be a coincidence. But it’s also natural to say that if the correlation extended outside the sample then there must—contrary our initial claim—be some explanation for it. I mean the conditional to be read in this first way, where we hold fixed our initial beliefs about the explanatory structure of the situation.
10 Peacocke [Citation2003: ch. 5] expresses a similar idea.
11 And this idea, I take it, is just as plausible when the extended pattern is a universal generalisation and so involves a ‘that’s all’ clause. Consider, for example, a version of the Anaemia case where the extended pattern under consideration is a universal generalisation—say, the generalisation ‘everyone in my city with that gene has anaemia.’ I take it that if we think that there would be no explanation of this extended pattern then we shouldn’t think that the pattern that we observed in the sample will extend to this universal generalisation.
12 In particular, it’s a task for my manuscript ‘Does anything explain the regularity of the world?’
13 Thanks to Chris Dorst, Katie Elliott, Nina Emery, Alison Fernandes, Ned Hall, Mike Hicks, Siegfried Jaag, Christian Loew, Barry Loewer, Elizabeth Miller, Zee Perry, Erica Shumener, Peter Tan, and two referees for, and the editor of, AJP extremely helpful comments.