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Articles

Hume’s Problem of Induction

Patrick Brissey exposes a major unprovable assumption at the core of science.

Will the sun rise tomorrow? The answer seems simple: an emphatic “Yes!” But how do you know? We can imagine the following commonsense response: “Well, every morning, the sun rises; at least from my perspective. Wait until tomorrow; you’ll see!” The reasoning is that, based on past observations, we know that the sun will more than likely rise in the morning. Notice that this conclusion is not certain: the argument is not a purely logical deduction. There are, after all unlikely science fiction scenarios where the sun is suddenly destroyed. These scenarios show that the claim the sun will rise in the morning is possibly false.

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