Hume's Problem of Induction

so for today's video we're going to be talking about a very well known problem within the philosophy of science and it's one of my personal favorites David Humes problem of induction [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] before we get into the problem of induction itself I first wanted to talk a little bit about what induction is for those that might not know so to start off with an example I might notice that every single time I release an object in midair that it's fallen to the ground as a result of these observations I might infer that the next time I drop an object from the air that it'll also fall to the ground in fact as a result of all of my past observations of objects falling to the ground I might infer that if I ever want to drop another object from the air and it'll always fall to the ground every single time forever on into the future the kind of reasoning that I just did here is inductive reasoning and so you can say induction is just a type of reasoning where a person observes something that's always happened in the past and then based on these past observations makes the prediction that the future will behave in the same way or in other words that the future will resemble the past so if I were to hold an object out in midair and then think of myself that it'll fall if I release it I'm making an inductive inference about the future based on past observations an example of this kind of reasoning might look something like this in argument form on Monday I dropped an apple and it fell to the ground on Tuesday I dropped an apple and it fell to the ground therefore if I drop an apple tomorrow on Wednesday it will fall to the ground the philosopher David Hume had a problem with this kind of reasoning hence the name the problem of induction fumé thinks that when we make inductive arguments like this we're assuming that the future will always behave in the same way as the past we're assuming that the future will resemble the past in other words we formed this assumption that nature uniform that it's stable that is unchanging that possesses a kind of regularity so human things were simply observing the regularities of the past and we're projecting these regularities onto the events of the future without any justification for it as a result he refers to inductive reasoning as habit or custom suggesting that our tendency to reason inductively is just a natural inclination that humans have that really has no grounding and this is why human caused these events that are constantly conjoined together customary conjunctions because their events that we've become accustomed to see happening one after the other we've always seen these things happen together we've always seen objects fall after we let go of them the boys experienced heat when we go up to a flame and we've always experienced the sensation of being cold when we touch snow but Hume thinks that just because in the past event B is always followed of an A doesn't mean that the order of events will always be this way who knows tomorrow even a could follow event B so Hume joint is that it's not logically impossible that tomorrow I could try to drop an object and instead of falling it could float away into the sky so humans say just because two events are constantly conjoined together doesn't mean that there's any causal relationship between the two events or that there's any necessary connection and if there's no good reason to say that there's a necessary connection between event a and event B then there's no good reason to say that they must occur together or occur in that order in the future so in order to justify that the future will always behave in the same way as the past one would have to prove that nature is uniform and even if Nature has been uniform in the past how would you prove that it's going to be uniform in the future who's to say that the laws of nature won't change tomorrow so some might want to argue with Hume and say well no look in the past the universe has always been stable and unchanging therefore the future is always going to be the same way it's always going to be stable and unchanging this as you might guess is using induction to try to prove induction it's the same thing as saying well every time I dropped an apple in the past it fell so every time I drop an apple in the future it's gonna fall it's the same concept you're taking observations of regularities in nature from the past and projecting those regularities onto the future so you're just left with a circular argument you're basically saying let me use induction to show you that you can justify using induction so again for Hume there's no legitimate reason why we can assume that nature is always going to be uniform even though it might have always been in the past now it's also important to mention that although humans if this habit that we have isn't rational he also recognizes it as an important tool for daily life if we were constantly having a question whether all the laws of nature we're going to change tomorrow it'd be really hard to navigate like Hume doesn't ever think this habit is just gonna go away it's sort of ingrained in us and it's just a natural thing that we do to help us make these useful predictions about the future although they may not be necessarily accurate all right well this is the end of the video I hope you guys enjoyed it and maybe learn something new if you have any questions comments criticisms feel free to post those in the comment section down below and again thank you so much for watching and I hope you have some more videos coming out soon [Music]

Channel: Philosophermit

Views: 3,205

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Induction, David Hume, Hume, The Problem of Induction, Philosophy, Philosophers, Intro to Philosophy, Science, Problems for Science, Inductive Reasoning, Inductive Inference, Introduction to Philosophy, Philosophy 101

Id: JIO-F6pss4s

Length: 5min 31sec (331 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020